Further developmental stages of the interest in money

Ferenczi, in his psychoanalytic classic on the ontogenesis (development in the individual) of the interest in money, without designating it as such, traced a phylogenetic or evolutionary sequence that took us by a series of transformations from the anal-cloacal erotism of valuation of a fecal body product (the infant's love of feces) to deodorized (like mud), dehydrated (like sand), decolorized, hardened, smooth (like stones and buttons) fecal substitutes that finally as coins are made to shine. This is to consider money as shiny possessable objects that would be of equal interest to simian species. Surely money can be analogized to other body products; and I have previously suggested (1969) that words also are a treasury of wealth that are valued as body products and also archaically associated with feces. But the youngest of the 18 suburban children in this pilot study seemed already to have related money to the love of their parents and grandparents. Further developmental stages of the human interest in money, here only suggested, appear to proceed as follows: curiosity about money as a belonging of the parents in oedipal-stage grasp of family politics (which may persist if childhood selfishness remains unleavened); money as a reward and exchange in latency trading (whether by boys and girls or grown-up "traders" in the financial "game"); money as a measure of status and class and as an indication of group identity in adolescence (which may persist in senses of group entitlement); and various levels of mature appreciation of money as a system of universal agreement, as a translatable, fungible form of information to register relative value, and as capital, an ingredient of productivity. Further study of the mental stages of the appreciation of money is warranted, but the social context appears unavoidably central. Ultimately money may be purely a mean that finally (harking back to its symbolic body origin) will be fully separated from the self in acts of riddance and gifting that vary from exercising power to loving bestowal (Kolb), and from jealous greed to generosity. Piagetian cognitive stages are exemplified by the children's approach to money at different ages; for example, even in this limited sample there is indication of a principle of conservation of value (here proposed) that appears in latency as an equivalent of the principle of conservation of volume. Neuropsychiatric impairment may lead to increasing concreteness in the representation of money as feces (which I have termed "the return of Ferenczi").(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)