Money and Psychoanalytic Treatment

The role of money in the analytic setting is an essential aspect of the arrangements that institute treatment and underpin it as it proceeds. Freud realized early on that subjective attitudes toward money are sure to create difficulties, for they inevitably are affected by outside reality, that is to say social and economic factors, and affect psychic reality, especially in its sexual dimension. Payment, as customarily required in the contract between analyst and patient, is a necessary if not always sufficient condition—the needed symbolic...