Is There a Croesus Complex?

"God the Father" by Cima de Conigliano (1515)

The Times recently ran a piece about the discipline of financial therapy (“Stressed by Money? Get on the Couch,” NYT, 2/9/15). Usually one needs some degree of financial security to pay for therapy which is only covered on a limited basis by most health plans. So the kind of person who one imagines going into financial therapy because he or she has financial problems may be hard put to pay for it. For instance the person who spends more than they have might go into financial therapy, but if the therapy were long term, it might result in bankruptcy as a result of the treatment itself. There’s an old Pete Seeger line which might apply here, “Oh Dr. Freud, Oh Dr. Freud. How we wish you had been differential employed. For the set of circumstances sure enhances the finances of the followers of Dr. Sigmund Freud..." Or let’s take the person who is frugal, he or she is not going to go into financial therapy to improve largesse because he or she doesn’t like to spend money. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tverskty, the nobel prize winning economists, have written about “loss aversion,” a condition where people make bad decisions due to irrational fears. Money along with sex and relationships are subjects that people in any form of therapy talk about, but financial therapy like sex therapy obviously has a particular aim. In normal therapy the idea is that if a patient deals with deep seated problems that result in maladaptive behavior, a person will start to make better decisions when it comes to money or sex. Just as a gambler might start investing in low yielding, but secure tax free municipals, a promiscuous man or woman might settle into safe and secure relationships that are totally lacking in passion. However, let’s consider the case of the patient who decides his or her basic problem isn’t his or her personality. It’s just money. Such an individual might go to a financial therapist who will improve their yield or a sex therapist who will enable them to have lots of hot sex with the same person—say a partner who liked to dress up like a male or female whore. However, caveat emptor. No matter how much credit card debt you retire, you may still suffer from bigger problems than just money or love.  For example, you might be suffering from the kind of existential anxiety that comes from the realization that God is Dead.

Prefer An Unmelancholy Dane?

Edwin Booth’s Hamlet

At the end of a Times Op Ed article entitled “Learning How to Exert Self-Control,” (NYT, 9/13/14), Pamela Druckerman quotes Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia as saying, “Melancholy is not one of my emotions. Quite seriously, I don’t do melancholy. It’s a miserable way to be.” Mischel was the author of the famous “marshmallow test” in which children were asked to defer gratification (and has written a book called The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control). Those who were able to defer gratification often did better in life. Druckerman quotes Mischel to the effect that “We don’t need to be victims of our emotions. We have a prefrontal cortex that allows us to evaluate whether or not we like the emotions that are running us.” But there are others who might disagree. Take the Noble prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman who has written about the enormous role the irrational plays in human life and how people are ruled by unconscious drives over which they have relatively little control. Kahneman, for example,  has demonstrated the role of “loss aversion” in economic life. The work of the neuroscientists, Antoine Bechara, Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio and Steven Anderson, whose Iowa Gambling Task deals with emotion based learning, also appear to confute Mischel’s view. How easy or beneficial is it to discountenance melancholy? Sure there are people who have an endlessly positive and productive worldview. But sometimes this kind of behavior is known as denial. And those who embody it represent a juggernaut of wishful thinking and rational constructs (products of their prefrontal cortex no doubt) that denies the complexity and beauty of what it means to be human. Was Hamlet’s problem simply that he didn’t control his emotions?

Lives of Our Leaders: Obama’s Acceptance Speech

Photograph: Pete Souza, The Obama-Biden Transition Project

The difference between Bill Clinton’s speech on Wednesday night and Barack Obama’s last night was that of the philosopher/statesman versus the politician. It was back to business as usual as Barack Obama accepted his party’s nomination for president. In her remarks yet the night before Michele Obama had painted a picture of her husband as a profound thinker who, when all is said and done, has repeatedly been placed in the position of making solitary judgements. Of course, these kind of liminal matters, which require a kind of shooting from the hip, that transcends charts and facts and advisors, are the province of all presidents (in this regard it’s interesting that a rationalist like Obama has been reported to be reading Nobel prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow in which subliminal messages play such a large role). In his Op Ed piece yesterday, (“Obama’s First-Term Report Card,” NYT, 9/5/12), Nicholas Kristof gave Obama an F in communication saying “He has not made the case for his policies, nor has he comforted the nation as Franklin Roosevelt did in his fireside chats.” Maybe that’s the problem. Clinton is almost evangelical and has a gravitas that Obama can’t seem to muster. The message is basically the same. The problem is the messenger. When you see Clinton in the Obama for President ads, you want to re-elect the former president.