Photo: Jessica Craig-Martin

What is it about money? We envy it, some of us kill for it, we look down our noses at it, some of us won’t have anything to do with it, and yet its place in the cultural consciousness is assured. Money, that is, can’t be overlooked, pro or con. Freud, who had his own complex relationship with money, cultivating some patients solely in the hope of their endowing his psychoanalytic endeavor, thought that wealth could never bring happiness because it didn’t answer an infantile wish—that its roots lay later on in human development. Still, while blithely equating money with feces in the unconscious, he himself was not immune to its power: “My mood also depends very strongly on my earnings,” he wrote to a colleague. “Money is laughing gas for me.”
One might argue that money is laughing gas for most of us in its ability to dissipate anxiety and send our spirits soaring. It speaks to our sense of freedom, to our wish not to be hemmed in by the prosaic circumstances of our lives. Although you can travel on $5 a day (or used to be able to), it is far less taxing and more cushy to travel by private jet. Among money’s less overtly acknowledged uses, which is implicitly addressed by purveyors of luxury brands, is separating one from the masses, ensuring that one feels like a king or queen for a day—or a week, or a lifetime.
But here’s the odd thing: Although money in itself arouses many emotions, including admiration, we tend to despise the people in possession of it. We suspect them of having come by it unfairly, of somehow not being “worthy” of their own wealth. The popular animus against the rich is inscribed in our cultural narrative as surely as is our curiosity about them; indeed, the critic Lionel Trilling observed that “the novel is born with the appearance of money as a social element.” Perhaps the most comprehending “insider” novel ever written about the damage money can do is The Great Gatsby, in which F. Scott Fitzgerald observes of the immensely rich Tom and Daisy Buchanan: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”