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This paper offers a psychoanalytic exploration of the dynamics of greed in individual lives and ways that those dynamics both reflect and influence the surrounding culture. The paper discusses the contradictions associated with the consumerist pursuit of wealth and goods, and finds evidence for the failure of such pursuit to provide the satisfaction that is anticipated. It also examines the implications for psychoanalytic theorizing on the ways in which ongoing social forces and institutions contribute to shaping the psyche.
KEY WORDS: Horney; society; greed; envy; materialism; consumer.
The great strength of psychoanalysis is not so much in its answers as in its questions. Psychoanalysis is, most of all, a point of view that probes beneath the surface of the obvious and raises questions about what we have comfortably assumed. Perhaps the most important product of a wellconducted analysis is increased curiosity. What is dull and settled becomes interesting. As a consequence, what was locked in becomes potentially changeable. The vagaries of professional status and the economics of insurance reimbursement lead our profession to emphasize its parallels with medicine. But in reality, our roots, lie much more in philosophy. Socrates, much more than Hippocrates, was Freud's precursor. The questioning dialogue, rather than the definitive diagnosis, is the hallmark of the psychoanalytic method and of its benefits and virtues.
In keeping with this emphasis, my main aim in this paper is to try to make the reader curious, to lead him or her to notice, and to find at least a little bit odd, some of the standard assumptions and characteristics of our society's way of life. Only secondarily do I aim to offer some speculative psychoanalytic hypotheses regarding their sources and dynamics. In essence, I approach life in contemporary American society in much the way a good psychoanalyst or psychotherapist approaches issues of character with an individual patient. The value of the work lies most of all in making potentially ego-alien what has been ego-syntonic, in leading the patient to look at what he or she has previously simply taken for granted.
Specifically, I want to turn the reader's scrutiny to the economic side of our lives-how we decide what we "need," whether we are doing well or not well, whether we have enough or...