Chapter Announcement by Ricardo Rieppi (USA) and Jean Petrucelli (USA)
Rieppi, Ricardo & Petrucelli, Jean (2019). Shopping addiction. In: Beyond the Primal Addiction: Food, Sex, Gambling, Internet, Shopping, and Work, N. Savelle-Rocklin and S. Akhtar, Eds., pp. 73–95. New York: Routledge.
Among the most emotionally charged subjects in contemporary life and in psychoanalytic work, money is suffused with conscious and unconscious associations to power, security, self-worth and love. These unconscious meanings affect unconscious motivations that clash with conscious striving and create problematic money symptoms, such as compulsive shopping, which can be seen as attempts to amend a missed or derailed developmental need. Exploring how patients regard and handle money can help us reveal, understand and resolve our patients’ most powerfully influential attitudes, beliefs and feelings, and help us explore deeper issues of developmental arrest and psychic conflict. This chapter discusses historical and contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives on money and its use, with a primary focus on central themes that underlie our clinical understanding and treatment of compulsive shopping. The authors review psychoanalytic conceptions of money; examine the meaning, clinical process, and psychoanalytic treatment of compulsive shopping; and explore clinical material illustrating issues related to its treatment.
Ricardo Rieppi, Ph.D.
330 West 58th Street
New York, NY 10019
Email Ricardo Rieppi
Jean Petrucelli, Ph.D.
470 West End Ave
New York, NY 10024
Email Jean Petrucelli
