The psychology of money deals with the problems of person’s relationship with money at the contact boundary, and explores the influence of financial factors on the mechanisms of human behavior, decision making and relationships with others.

Plutus (Greek: Πλοῦτος, Ploutos, literally “wealth” – god of wealth and abundance) was the son of Demeter, the goddess of fertility, and according to myth, was conceived by Demeter and Iasion in a thrice-plowed field in Crete, as the embodiment of Demeter’s teaching of agriculture to the people. That is, wealth is the result of activities that bring maximum benefit to people with the ability to receive payment for their work and their product, in other words – to satisfy their needs simultaneously with the needs of other people, which is exactly what happens at the contact boundary of a person with his environment. Therefore, we consider money as a metaphor for the concept of boundary-contact, like skin and speech, because on the one hand, in today’s market economy, they make us separate, allowing us to meet many needs (food, comfort, self-realization, knowledge and many others, even self-expression), and on the other hand — provide an opportunity to interact with the environment.

Referring once again to the words of Fritz Perls that all psychological phenomena occur precisely at the boundary-contact, and “our thoughts, our actions, our behavior, and our emotions are our way of experiencing and meeting these boundary events”, so by working with thoughts and actions, considering behavior and touching emotions in relation to money as a metaphor for the contact boundary, we can determine how we interact with the environment, how we feel our boundaries.

According to the myth, Plutus was blinded by Zeus for the sake of impartial distribution of wealth. What does this mean? This means that no higher powers can interfere in a person’s relationship with wealth and poverty, i.e. with money, nor can answer prayers and petitions associated with this, as well as can not reward wealth only for person being good or bad, righteous or rogue, and only a person can take ownership and be responsible for their financial state. The main idea here is that money lies outside the paradigm of judgments about good and evil and outside the evaluation of human virtue, that is, by its very nature, it is free from introjects and from depreciation.

Thus, therapy of the relationships with money focuses on working with the mechanisms of contact interruption as an opportunity to release the energy of creative adaptation for earning. Therefore, money, being a way of satisfying needs, in itself, has no value, only what is needed has value, therefore, there is no need for money, and the figure shifts from the need to have money to the opportunities that they open for growth and formation of personality in the process of activity. From this we conclude that the nature of money is infinity, and since human nature also tends to infinity, then money is not static and can not only be the result, unlike what the success coaches say. This means that while having money, a person must constantly develop (the property of capital is sometimes compared to cycling uphill: if you stop, you will roll down), which proves the importance of not only the result, but also the process. Human nature is defined by constant growth and development through the endless formation of gestalts and contact cycles through which needs also grow.

In other words, the conditions of the environment are constantly changing, and in order to grow and achieve balance, you need to self-preserve (achieve a result), and in order to self-preserve and achieve a result, you need to constantly grow.

Since the growth of the organism is contacting-engaging at the interaction boundary of organism-environment, it is appropriate to speak of the theory of self as of an agent of growth and as a system of contacts. Relations with money, as a resource located at the contact boundary, are accompanied by multiple conflicts, excitement and agitation, but not because they themselves are charged with emotions (remember that money is impartial), but because at the contact boundary, in contact with the environment, with the world, society, other people, our self manifests itself as a system of contacts, which creates gestalts and the process of forming a figure-ground. Therefore a person’s relationship with money directly depends on the work of Self functions: Id, ego and personality, i.e. the functions responsible for what a person feels, what he does and who he is, and what he knows about himself.

It is curious that Plato, while describing his ideal state, says that the human soul consists of three parts: the spirited (affective emotional), the appetitive, and the logical. These parts are unevenly distributed in a person: if the spirited one prevails, then a person is inclined to be a warrior, the appetitive – a craftsman or a farmer, and if the logical – a philosopher. And since he relied on the ancient Greek vision of the world, which, in many respects, was not yet characterized by individualistic approach, and there was a single field, not divided into organism-environment, Plato proposed creating a state in which people with a predominance of a certain part, will do their job: philosophers will govern, warriors protect, and artisans and farmers will labor and feed the state. As early as the 5th century BC, we see the description of Self under the guise of Id (affective emotional part), ego (appetitive) and personality (logical). But since then, humanity has changed and instead of a single field individualistic consciousness prevails in the modern world. With this in mind, we are talking about the contact boundary, the division into organism-environment, and therefore – introduce the concept of Self functions and assign it not to society as a whole, but to the person, the individual, and we say that they work only in contact with the world. In this sense, a person’s relationship with money is determined not just by individual needs and their satisfaction, but also by taking into account universal needs.

So, according to this theory, a person, in the process of making money through his activities, should set himself the following questions, which relate to the functions of Self:

• What do I feel in reference to money in my activity?
• What do I do or do not do with it in my activity due to its presence or absence?
• Who am I? What am I in this activity? What am I in relation to activity and money? What are my qualities that define this relationship? What experience makes me like this?

In order for the answers to be complete, it is necessary to acknowledge the needs, both personal and the needs of the customers. Between these needs there is a space-boundary of contact, and this is where Self manifests itself as an emotional energy resource that can turn activity into a fascinating and interesting process. The contact boundary is considered as a space in which the interaction of a person with his environment implies differentiation into “I” and “you”, into everything that separates and distinguishes, on the one hand, and everything that allows you to meet and interact – on the other. Money is precisely the way in which the modern world to a great extent encourages people to interact with each other not only in order to survive, satisfying basic needs, but also to self-realize and self-actualize as a spiritual person through certain activities. Money is always located between the process and the result, between joy and pleasure, between to be and to have, between to give and to take, between customers, for example, and professionals.

A very important condition for successful activity is the awareness of the need for self-realization and projection of talents and abilities into this activity (who I am, what I am, what I can – a function of personality), because when the activity is based only on the individual need for its final product (proflexia – a mechanism of interrupting contact, when we do for others what we want for ourselves), then there is a huge probability to “burn out”.

This is the danger of an individualistic approach, with the development of which the unified system of values disappears, the duality of good and evil, black and white, appears, and the person begins to dramatize, suffering because of splitting and separation, by concentrating on individual needs without taking into account the common needs, ignoring the reality of the environment. Self, being an operating system at the contact boundary of a person and the environment, is able to restore the perception of a unified field.

People who are sensitive to this field in their activities, usually earn very well (take, for example, Mark Zuckerberg). It is interesting that the world of consumerism was built on this model, on Freud’s developments, which were introduced into big business by his nephew Edward Bernays in the United States (I recommend watching the documentary “The century of the self”).

The father of comedy Aristophanes, an ancient Greek comediographer, in the 4th century BC wrote a comedy called “Plutus”, in which he tells about the blind God of wealth, who met a small farmer Chremylos, and to get rich himself and help honest good people become rich, he decided to take Plutus to the temple of Asclepius to heal from blindness, so that god could henceforth distribute wealth not impartially, as Zeus wished, but fairly bestow only good people for their virtue.

It all ended with the story that after recovering his sight, Pluto made poor good people rich, but it led to chaos, because people stopped honoring the gods, offering them sacrifices and alms, and the gods, in their turn, came to these people to be hired to work in order to feed themselves. What had to happen in this case happened, as people ceased to respect other blessings, stopped working and engaging in activities, which were no longer needed and necessary, and all power passed to the god of wealth Plutus. And here appears before us in this comedy a curious character – the old woman in rags, Poverty. She warns people of the danger of her banishment with these words:

Let Plutus recover his sight and divide his favours out equally to all,
And none will ply either trade or art any longer;
All toil would be done away with. Who would wish
To hammer iron, build ships, sew, turn, cut up leather, bake bricks,
Bleach linen, tan hides, or break up the soil of the earth with the plough
And garner the gifts of Demeter,
If he could live in idleness and free from all this work?

And it is true that if there were total abundance in the world, people would cease to grow and develop, would cease to fear and appreciate many other blessings precisely because of excesses, necessity would disappear, and as Plato rightly noted in the dialogues, the world of human nature is a combination of intellect and necessity.

I often ask my clients the question, if they had a lot of money, what kind of life they would live, what would they do, how would their day look. And you know what? Most often people want money to do nothing, they do not see themselves in activity, only in idleness, and in idleness the personality perishes because it cannot feel the joy of growth and overcoming. When we extract something from ourselves into the world, we satisfy it, it seems to come to life at our sight, becoming visible through our efforts, and when we take its blessings, we satisfy ourselves by taking care of the necessity.

Money is a means of exchanging joy for pleasure. Coming out of the individual paradigm of perception of the world, gives us a sense of the field at the contact boundary, where our needs are synchronized with the needs of the environment and the people who are in it. It is in this way that we ourselves become a source of wealth for others, and the contact boundary turns suffering into resources.