Sally, a woman in her 40s had built up enormous credit card debt - in the tens of thousands.
Sally had brought this problem to group therapy or more accurately group psychoanalysis - an experience she had recently begun. The group members suggested that this debt was because of her problems with her mother.
The idea sounded outrageous to her. She laughed heartily. "What in the world could my mother have to do with debt?" "You might think we're crazy," one group member said in response, "but you laughed. That means you got what we said." This is a truism among the denizens of psychoanalysis: when someone laughs in response to an idea or a comment, it is a fair bet that you have reached their unconscious.
Sally, however, wasn't buying. "Didn't Freud once say that sometimes debt is just debt -- or something like that?"
To be sure, he may have said something like that, but few things in psychoanalysis are accepted at face value. Lateness, accidents, even illness are scrutinized for unconscious meaning and intent. Something as commonplace as minor lateness might be examined: Is it avoidance, a way of communicating hidden conflict, intent to withhold or even hostile behavior? Analysis can seem silly especially when it seems to make friction where there is none, but just as often it illuminates.
Sally had to consider that she did feel her mother as a weight on her mind - someone she had to carry around and take care of - a burden, a great big burden from earliest memories. "It's remarkable, but whenever I go to the ATM machine and it shows a negative balance the first thought that flashes through my mind is "mother".
The fact is that some people do function with the schema that they must carry someone around and support them financially or emotionally. Where does this come from?
People often describe their relationship with the "universe" using similar terms as they would describe their mother. If you felt undernourished by mother, chances are you feel under-nourished by the universe. I recall a friend of mine from childhood who had a mother as unyielding as stone. Recently, I saw him. He is struggling (and always has) to make ends meet. "The world is an un-nourishing, unforgiving rock to me. I have no luck."
In Sally's case, with the help of her group, she began to consider that the enormous debt that she accrued had meaning in addition to the reality of not having enough. It was a symbolic representation of her relationship with her mother.
She put it this way: "Here was this wonderful card that would finally give me the extra little bit that I needed. It was the mother I never had. But how could I be so stupid? Why didn't I realize that this card was not a gift giver, but an interest-taker?"
Of course this was not Sally's problem alone: millions of people across the US have incurred $2.6 trillion dollars in consumer debt? Do they all have problems with their mothers?
No, but loans for many people are quite easily confused with other things. The late psychoanalyst Hyman Spotnitz once observed that a loan is often processed by the unconscious as a gift. Sally was particularly vulnerable to this seduction because it was similar in rhythm to the way her mother cared for her. She gave, but somehow with the idea that Sally would have to give her back.
Obviously, enormously powerful currents swirl in a global economy. These currents are independent of if not impervious to the thicket of interpersonal and oedipal dramas that afflict humankind.
Nevertheless, if the searchlights can be turned on in the midst of a raging storm, we can discern, even through the driving rain, the rhythm of our lives, the arc of personality, the trajectory of personal dramas that shape, influence and sometimes litter the financial landscape.
*Acknowledgment to my NCAPS co-faculty member, Robin R. Benjamin, PsyA, LP, LCSW
