Money, Money, Money

The commonest and most neglected illness in the U.S. today is money-sickness, Dr. William Kaufman told the American Psychiatric Association in Boston last week. And one reason why it is not often detected, said the Bridgeport (Conn.) psychosomaticist, is that many doctors have their own unresolved problems regarding the use of money. This serves as an unconscious check which keeps them from recognizing or investigating the abnormal psycho-economic behavior of their patients.

An individual's attitude toward money, whether healthy or not, is usually determined early in life, said Dr. Kaufman. If it is unhealthy, it may touch off a variety of psychosomatic illnesses, such as headaches, anxiety states, hysterical paralysis, panic reactions, depression, or disorders of the digestive system, heart and lung function, or muscular control.

Studying more than a thousand of his patients, Dr. Kaufman has seen compulsive non-spenders (ranging from the merely conservative to the downright miserly), whose money-hunger represented love-hunger. "Most of these people," he said, "were deprived in their early lives of love and affection, and experienced poverty, punishment and regimentation. Symbolically, money represents the love, affection and security . . . for which they have an insatiable craving." At the opposite end of the spectrum are compulsive spenders, who may become sick if they are forced to save or stop spending. Many of these, says Dr. Kaufman, were overprotected in childhood by an overindulgent parent who guiltily substituted money gifts for the boon of love. Usually one parent was strict, but the other overcompensated for his severity. Other compulsive spenders, who had neither money nor love in childhood, spend selfishly as adults to give themselves a substitute for love.

The complications of money-sickness are endless, Dr. Kaufman indicated. But the doctor who can treat the disease, by frank discussion of the relationship between money and moods, can help society as a whole, as well as his patient.

Other items of medical interest at the meetings sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

> Loving kindness can make as much difference to the growing rat as to the developing child, said Psychologist Otto Weininger of Toronto. Laboratory rats that he petted and fondled grew faster and bigger, and resisted stress better than their brother rats.

> "Neuromuscular television" was the name given by Chicago's Dr. Edmund Jacobson to a gadget for helping heart patients to relax. The tension in a patient's muscles and nerves is projected on a screen so that he can see the effect of his efforts to relax.

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