"MONEY is a psychic reality" ~ James Hillman
Since I believe in the power of sharing personal experiences, I would be interested in your reflections on the text (see below) by Hillman and ways you can relate to that. I think money is another taboo question that we often fear discussing, myself included (besides death and sex, for example).
According to my experience, thinking of money brings up shame and guilt. I feel too that we inevitably integrate certain concepts in connection with money through past generations (here I can think of what my grandparents shared with me and what I know about their struggles and beliefs in connection with it). Besides that, it is inevitable that we learn about money through the culture we grow up in. It’s enough to think of the idioms we have in our language connected to the possession or lack of money. Can you mention a few that you can remember and those you were told as a child (from part of the elderly, as a piece of advice, for example)?
Let's now turn to the wisdom of James Hillman:
"Whatever we say about money in its relation with analytical practice, whatever we say about money at all will be conditioned by the mind-set of our cultural tradition. We speak first of all at an unreflected level, with the voice of collective consciousness, to use Jung’s term. So, in order to gain purchase on the money question in analysis, we have first to see through our collective consciousness, the very deep, old, and imperceptible attitudes that archetypally, let us say, have money already fixed within a definite framework, especially in regard to soul.
(...)
I see money as an archetypal dominant that can be taken spiritually or materially, but which in itself is neither. Rather, money is a psychic reality, and as such gives rise to divisions and oppositions about it, much as other fundamental psychic realities—love and work, death and sexuality, politics and religion—are archetypal dominants which easily fall into opposing spiritual and material interpretations. Moreover, since money is an archetypal psychic reality, it will always be inherently problematic because psychic realities are complex, complicated. Therefore, money problems are inevitable, necessary, irreducible, always present, and potentially if not actually overwhelming. Money is devilishly divine. One of Charles Olson’s Maximus poems sets out this archetypal view most compactly:
"the under part is, though stemmed, uncertain is, as sex is, ‘as moneys are, facts to be dealt with as the sea is. . ."
This is an extraordinary statement. ‘‘Facts to be dealt with as the sea is.’’ The first of these facts is that money is as deep and broad as the ocean, the primordially unconscious, and makes us so. It always takes us into great depths, where sharks and suckers, hard-shell crabs, tight clams and tidal emotions abound. Its facts have huge horizons, as huge as sex, and just as protean and polymorphous.
Moreover, money is plural: moneys. Therefore I can never take moneys as an equivalent for any single idea: exchange, energy, value, reality, evil, and whatever. It is many-stemmed, it is uncertain, polymorphous. At one moment the money complex may invite Danae who draws Zeus into her lap as a shower of coins, at another moment the gold may invite Midas. Or, Hermes the thief, patron of merchants, easy commerce. Or it may be old moneybags Saturn who invented coining and hoarding to begin with. As on the original coins the Greeks made, there are different Gods and different animals—owls, bulls, rams, crabs—each time the complex is passed from hand to hand. Money is as protean as the sea-God himself; try as we might with fixed fees, regular billings, and accounts ledgered and audited, we never can make the stems of money balance. The checkbook will never tally, the budget will never stay within bookkeeping columns. We invent more and more machinery for controlling money, more and more refined gauges for economic prediction, never grasping what Olson tells us: the facts of money are like the facts of the sea. Money is like the id itself, the primordially repressed, the collective unconscious appearing in specific denominations, that is, precise quanta or configurations of value, i.e., images. Let us define money as that which possibilizes the imagination. Moneys are the riches of Pluto in which Hades’ psychic images lie concealed. To find imagination in yourself or a patient, turn to money behaviors and fantasies. You both will soon be in the underworld (the entrance to which requires a money for Charon).
Therapy draws back. Do you know of the study done on therapeutic taboos? Analysts were surveyed regarding what they feel they must never do with a patient. It was discovered that touching and holding, shouting and hitting, drinking, kissing, nudity and intercourse were all less prohibited than was ‘‘lending money to a patient.’’ Money constellated the ultimate taboo. For money always takes us into the sea, uncertain, whether it comes as inheritance fights, fantasies about new cars and old houses, marriage battles over spending, ripping off, tax evasion, market speculations, fear of going broke, poverty, charity—whether these complexes appear in dreams, in living rooms, or in public policy. For here in the facts of money is the great ocean, and maybe while trawling that sea floor during an analytical hour we may come up with a crazy crab or a fish with a shekel in its mouth."
~ James Hillman, excerpt from his essay "A Contribution to Soul and Money", (p. 31-44); part of the book "Soul and Money" which includes other, highly interesting studies on the topic by Russell A. Lockhart, Arwind Vasavada, John Weir Perry, Joel Covitz and Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig (Spring Publications, 1982).
"Fish and Crab", José Gutierrez Solana, 1928
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