Money, Ethics and the Psychoanalyst

Abstract

In the early 1960’s, Americans were idealistic about what they could achieve through their own efforts. The energies of many were directed toward helping others through the Peace Corps abroad and civil rights activism at home. It was a period of involvement and commitment. There was a sense of possibilities and the feeling that the world could be changed through individual endeavors. Now, after the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the increase of casual, seemingly irrational, violence in our society, the Vietnam war with its heritage of bitterness and lost innocence, the epidemic proportions of the drug problem, Watergate and the subsequent rash of revelations of wrong-doing for personal and political gain in government with indictments of top public officials and its echoes in the private sector such as in admissions of insider trading, the atmosphere has changed. We’ve had our scandals in sports, and are familiar with Medicaid fraud in health care. In religion, we have seen evangelists bilking their congregations. We are no longer shocked or even surprised by such disclosures. We adjust at a cost to our morale, with a growing sense of skepticism, and a shift from idealistic, helping pursuits to an age of narcissism (Lasch, 1979).