ABSTRACT
This chapter presents clinical material and its conceptualisation, money, is interwoven with the three major developmental phases that every member of the group-analytic group, and the group as a whole, go through as the therapy and the group evolve. The link contributes significantly to the child’s normal experience of the anal–sadistic stage and, consequently, to recognition of a genuine symbolic father with whom the correspondingly genuine symbolic value of money is related. A common trend consists of associating fee payment in psychotherapy with intersubjectivity and the patient–therapist relationship by revising and doubting Freud’s views about money in psychoanalysis symbolising faeces as fundamentally linked with the patient’s difficulties in the anal–sadistic stage of their development. The eventual result is the representation and acceptance of payment conceived as expressing gratitude for the “goodness” of the mother/group and the symbolic “death” of the group as a “good” or “bad” feeding object in Klein’s depressive position or, in Freud’s terms, as a “thing”.
