Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06729_Field_TCUM T294.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 913b | 16 lines

     Central to modern psychoanalytical theory is the relation
between the money complex and the human body. Some
analysts derive money from the infantile impulse to play with
feces. Ferenczi, in particular, calls money “nothing other than
odorless dehydrated filth that has been made to shine.”
Ferenczi, in his concept of money, is elaborating Freud’s
concept of “Character and Anal Erotism.” Although this idea of
linking “filthy lucre” with the anal has continued in the main
lines of psychoanalysis, it does not correspond sufficiently to
the nature and function of money in society to provide a theme
for the present chapter.

     Money began in nonliterate cultures as a commodity,
such as whales’ teeth on Fiji; or rats on Easter Island, which
later were considered a delicacy, were valued as a luxury, and
thus became a means of mediation or barter. When the