ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the question of whether, and to what extent, individual experience favours the transformation of anal-erotic interest into interest in money. The ontogenetic path of development of interest in money, while shewing individual differences dependent on the conditions of life, is nevertheless on the whole among civilised people to be regarded as a psychical process which seeks realisation under the most diverse circumstances, in one way or another. Every psycho-analyst is familiar with the symbolic meaning of money that was discovered by S. Freud "Wherever the archaic way of thinking has prevailed or still prevails, in the old civilisations, in myths, fairy-tales, superstition, in unconscious thinking, in dreams, and in neuroses, money has been brought into the closest connection with filth." Faeces arc, however, one of the first toys of the child. The child's interest for dejecta experiences its first distortion through the smell of faeces becoming disagreeable, disgusting.
