Newsletter Vol. VIII, No. 1, September, 1982

Soul and Money

Russell A. Lockhart, James Hillman, Arwind Vasavada, John Weir Perry, Joel Covitz, Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig

Dallas: Spring Publications Inc.,1982.

The six papers of Soul and Money were presented at the 8^th international congress of the International Association for Analytical Psychology held in San Francisco in 1980. Although there are some expressions of consensus, they would appear to represent every possible attitude towards money, its significance as a carrier of projections and its intrinsic value.

Money receives its most favourable press from Russell Lockhart in “Coins and Psychological Change.” A dream image stimulated by the invitation to address the

congress brings to mind a childhood experience involving a box of coins. While the loss of the coins marked the end of the author’s early imaginative life, their return in dream form sets the stage for a richly detailed exploration of Lockhart family history and legend, complemented by an equally fascinating etymological study. Money, in Lockhart’s view, is “the most powerful, practical and experienced form of transformation.”

Hillman’s contribution examines the collective depreciation of money within the Christian tradition and its effect on soul. Unless we give money its due, recognizing it as an archetypal dominant, we are in danger of loss of soul. Money holds soul in the vale of the world.

Without Hillman’s poetry, Joel Covitz also considers that money matters. He advocates the strengthening of the trickster figure. The Hermetic approach uses the power structure for the acquisition of money — tax shelters, not tax evasion. Yet we must be alert to the danger of the trickster who tricks himself.

The negative case against fee charging is made by Arwind Vasavadain “Fee-Less Practice and Soul Work.” He would place the onus for fee setting and payment on the receiver of services. Nothing is gained by adherence to a fixed fee scale; on the other hand, “sincerity of purpose always brings reciprocity and respect and a healing wholeness.”

Both Vasavada and John Weir Perry believe that voluntary poverty implies a basic trust between oneself and the universe which the accumulation of property may betray. “The shadow of analysis,” in Perry’s phrase, “is anything that separates us and our analysands.”

It is Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig’s concluding paper which restores the middle position. He attributes no intrinsic worth to money, but values it as a projective device. Projections of soul on money are more readily recognized and dealt with than those on relationships. Yet the aim of analysis is not the withdrawal of all projections, but the living of them with more depth and consciousness.

—Alice Johnston