Psychoanalytic Currency: Money, Commensurability, and Clinical Economies from Freud to Lacan

The Freudian psychoanalytic interpretation of a subject’s relation to money as a figuration of unconscious anal erotism remains an important theme in contemporary conceptions of money and finance. With this equivalence between money and feces at its core, three interrelated issues in the psychoanalytic perspective on money are discussed: (1) the significance of the analyst’s fee in the provision of clinical services, including how the patient’s payment is bypassed in Freud’s historical advocacy of free clinics; (2) the confluence between money and anal erotism itself, which shifts toward a correspondence between money and signifiers in Lacan’s theory; (3) the antinomy between Freud’s insistence on the analyst’s openness in money matters and the silence which continues to reign over many a public psychoanalytic discussion of money. Whereas the first issue raises questions about commensurability (how the amount of the fee is set and what it corresponds to) and the second problem elicits seemingly incompatible arguments on the de-commodifying effect of money, the third observation touches upon an unavoidable complication. For unlike other intellectual paradigms, psychoanalysis does not only offer a theory that makes money newly intelligible, but as a clinical practice with its unique type of (financial) transaction it also constitutes its own object of study.