Often in a psychoanalytic treatment, money is a vehicle, unconsciously used by our patients to obscure their deepest wishes and fears. However, the analyst’s own inner world of feelings surrounding money often allows such wishes and fears to be obscured. A decided upon fee, missed payments, missed billings, too high a fee, too low a fee, all, can become a concrete world in which the meaning of the money in a particular treatment goes unnoticed.

The meaning of money within the mind of the analyst can effect the analyst’s capacity to address the deeper and nuanced meaning of money in a treatment. When choosing to view money as mostly transactional, we turn away from important aspects of our patient’s past and inner world. So, how do we allow ourselves to earn a living, while at the same time manage the complex symbolism of money in an analytic treatment?

Please join us for an open house event as Pola Eisenstein-Rosan and Milos Markovic, both third-year candidates here at PANY, will present clinical material with follow up discussion by PANY Faculty members Carlos Almeida, MD, and Stephanie Newman, PhD, who will discuss the meaning of how  treating money only in the concrete, may have blurred the ability to live more fully in the symbolic while also respecting money’s place in the concrete as well.