Thus, we see in Fenichel’s assessment of money’s appeal, a significant expansion beyond childhood toilet training. Many of the factors I have already identified contribute to this appeal, as does the strong appeal to be found in the power (authoritarian rule) and control (financial authority) that did originate in the battle over bowel control (complemented by the obligatory psychoanalytic focus on fatherly transference).
Fuqua (1986, p. 21-22) now turns more specifically to the matter of narcissism:
“On the instinctual side, Fenichel sees the drive to accumulate wealth as a derivative of infantile narcissism transformed into a more realistic need to achieve power and self-esteem. Money is a source of “narcissistic supply” that originates in an instinctual need for food and for omnipotence. This need becomes a part of the ego—the ego ideal of wishing to become rich. This “will to power” with roots in infantile narcissism is different from the “will to possess,” which concerns the wish to control one’s own body and its products. In possessing money one bastions oneself against a familiar hierarchy of fears: fear of losses related to weaning, fear of losing control of defecation, and fear of castration. Yet, for Fenichel as for others, anal issues stand out empirically as most important of the three in regard to money.
Fenichel also reminds us that the equation money=feces in the unconscious is far from exhaustive. Money can symbolize anything one can take or give.”
A later group of neo-analysts offered a self-psychology perspective on narcissism. Led by Heinz Kohot, these analysts focus on an understanding of patients from within their personal subjective experience. David Krueger (1986) provides a summary of Kohut’s perspective regarding the psychological nature of money and the source of “grandiose” (narcissistic) obsessions regarding money. Krueger (1986, p. 24) first describes appropriate early childhood development:
“Children develop a cohesive, positive sense of self when consistent empathic parental responses reflect and validate the child’s sensations, feelings, and perceptions. The child’s developmental needs of empathic mirroring and affirmation exist from the first weeks and months of life. Kohut has described how the developmentally appropriate ”grandiose self” of the first two years of life is nurtured and undergoes transmutation into appropriate and mature self-esteem by parents who reflect the child’s experiences from the child’s frame of reference, thereby assuring the child of his/her worth. Throughout development, the phase-appropriate parental responses of accurate empathy, confirmation, admiration, and limit setting help the child transform and internalize grandiosity and exhibitionism into a more mature capacity for ambitions, goals, and internally regulated self-esteem.”
Krueger (1986, pp. 24-25) now sets the stage for exploring how Kohut and other self-psychologists see things going wrong later in childhood:
“The sense of self (a metaphorical and abstract representation of one’s identity and self-regard) is based on an initial formulation of a body self. The formation of an accurate and distinct body image emerges from parental mirroring of the developing child’s point of reference: parental reflections of internal sensation, and perceptions from the child’s experience (rather than the parents). This attunement to the separate center of the child’s initiative, as distinct from the adults’, begins in the autistic and symbiotic stages of development, extending in changing forms through separation-individuation phases. A failure to adequately address these development needs in preverbal time results in vague and indistinct body image boundaries; the resultant sense of self is incomplete and incoherent, as there is no solid foundation of body image on which to build.”
