Money Talks: Exchange, Sex and Meaning in Cassin and Lacan

This article aims to illuminate the power as well as some of the limitations of Cassin’s post-Lacanian theorization of how speech acts on speaker and listener, has meaning, and gets a grip on ‘things out there’. The article focuses on a narrow case study, namely what Cassin writes about paying to speak to a psychotherapist. First, it elucidates her elliptical comments about the ‘scandal’ of ‘paying for it’ and what this tells us about ‘truth’ and ‘value’ in psychotherapeutic conversations, especially conversations about payment. This involves grounding these theories in clinical realities more concretely than is usually done. The article then reflects critically on her position both by contextualizing it against what psychotherapists themselves have said about ‘money talk’ and by making explicit the developmental narrative that underpins the Lacanian theory, to which the article sketches an alternative inspired principally by Donald Winnicott.