ABSTRACT
The symbolic meanings of money and of the payment of fees are areas of rich and extensive psychoanalytic exploration within clinical work. Michael Schneider underlines the dependence of most analysts for their livelihood on high-fee patients, and their exposure to the laws of supply and demand of this marketplace. Dimen depicts the material basis of psychoanalysis as lying in commerce: 'We sell our services to make our living. analysts engage in trade. Without money, then, there's no psychoanalysis at all. But with it comes an unavoidable anxiety …'. Thus, the considerations of this chapter have foregrounded the necessarily embedded nature of psychoanalysis within contemporary market economies. The various debates have tended to assert the primacy of the therapist's need to earn, as a reaction to how this need has often been obscured or elided, embarrassing or too mundane to foreground, the legacy of a wider upper-class ethos of disdaining to talk about money, while having lots of it.
