Midas complex

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Midas accidentally turns his daughter into gold (Walter Crane, 1893)

The Midas complex is a psychoanalytic concept that Ernest Borneman developed in his work “Psychoanalysis of Money” based on Freud's Oedipus complex . The term is now used in connection with a pathological greed for money. But while the Oedipus complex directed at the parents became the core complex of the neuroses and thus the core complex of psychoanalysis , Borneman's Midas complex, which is related to gold and money, has received little attention in psychoanalysis. The psychoanalyst Wolfgang Harsch described it as follows in his work “The Midas Complex”: “In contrast to the Oedipus complex, the Midas complex, as a gold or money complex, appears as a pregenital complex in which the love of gold is loved by parents and children as well the sexual love replaces. ”While the Oedipus complex already belongs to the genital stage of development and is gender-specific, the midas complex is not and is still at the oral-anal stage of development.

King Midas is a figure in Greek mythology who is characterized by an excessive and thus life-threatening greed for gold. Midas asks Dionysus , whom he has entertained, that everything he touched should turn into gold. But he has to discover that for him food and drink, clothes and women are now also turning into gold. Borneman writes: “Here the suppression of use value by exchange value has not only negated the use of beings and things, but threatens to negate the owner: he dies of money, he starves, dies of thirst, freezes to death on money. In this sense the anal character destroys itself because it is also the product of the same repression ”. For Borneman, the Midas complex is a reflection of the economic conditions: "The daily, inevitable, inescapable transformation of all tangible values ​​into intangible, interchangeable categories such as goods, money, price and wages has completely changed the human soul in capitalism compared to the feudal era".

Proof of citation

  1. ↑ Ernest Borneman : Psychoanalysis of Money , p. 421 ff., Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1973; ISBN 978-3-8379-2143-4
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Harsch : The Midas complex: On the unconscious meaning of gold, money and capital , pp. 77/78, Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag 2012; ISBN 978-3-8379-2143-4
  3. ↑ ibid p. 87
  4. ↑ cf. Ovid , Metamorphoses, Book XI, verses 102-145
  5. ↑ Ernest Borneman : Psychoanalysis of Money , p. 447, Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1973; ISBN 978-3-8379-2143-4
  6. ↑ ibid. P. 446

literature

  • Sigmund Freud : Character and Anal Erotik (1908), in: Gesammelte Werke , Vol. VII, London: Imago, 1940–1952
  • Ernest Borneman : Psychoanalysis of Money , Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1973
  • Wolfgang Harsch : The Midas complex: On the unconscious meaning of gold, money and capital , Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2012