The question now becomes: “How do people become Narcissists?” An accompanying question is also waiting in the wings: “Why do many Narcissists turn to money as a way to expand their pool of admiration?” Members of a particular school of psychology have answers to both of these questions. There are the psychoanalysts who followed in the footsteps of Sigmund Freud.
Many of the early followers of Freud, such as Sandor Ferenczi, Ernest Jones, and Karl Abraham, built on Freud’s assessment of the connection between money and anal erotic instincts in his study of the Rat Man (Fuqua, 1986, pp. 19-21). For these early analysts, emphasis was placed on infantile grandiosity. Excretion was one thing children could fully control (and their parents could not control). If the parent tries too hard to gain control, then feces become something of great value. Narcissistic attraction to money may relate directly to this desire for control. In presenting the perspectives offered by Ernest Jones and Karl Abraham, Paula Fuqua (1986, p. 21) offers the following summary:
“. . . an excessively strict or premature toilet training can result in a too sudden loss of this sense of perfection and power, resulting in massive feelings of inadequacy in later life. It can also lead to an inability to love fully, since one’s libido becomes fixed at the level of the function of bowel control and is not transformed into an interest in the person for whom bowel control is achieved.”
We thus see in the life of Narcissists a love of money (and resulting power and control) at the expense of any capacity to love another person (a primary narcissistic trait).
At this point, Dr. Fuqua turns to the insights offered by Otto Fenichel, another second-generation psychoanalyst. Specializing in Narcissism, Fenichel devoted considerable attention to the connection between money and what he called “narcissistic supply” (a type of admiration, interpersonal support, or sustenance drawn by an individual from their environment that becomes essential to their self-esteem). Fuqua (1986, p. 21) offers the following distillation of Fenichel’s perspective (and points to a Marxist influence on this perspective):
“Otto Fenichel maintains that the instinctual source of interest in money is enhanced by its social significance. Money conveys real advantages of power and prestige and has survival value in purchasing food and shelter. The interplay of social and instinctual influences is an essential relation. His point of view has interesting Marxist influences. For example, discussing money publicly is considered indelicate not only because of its unconscious identification with feces, but also because promotion of ignorance of financial matters among the disadvantaged is a means by which the upper classes maintain their financial superiority. The authoritarian structure of society is more than a remnant of the infantile Oedipus complex. It serves the purpose of perpetuation of financial authority via a father transference to those holding economic power.”
