The myth made sense, but perhaps more important for its longevity, it satisfied the unconscious craving for stability, if not certainty.
Never mind that historians have failed to find any evidence that barter was ever the basis for an economy. This myth survived into modernity it was embraced by John Locke and Adam Smith, among many others. It’s the myth of barter-that money is a commodity with a basis in a substance other than itself, that money is certifiably valuable. The oldest myth about money dates at least to Aristotle. Our security-both physical and psychological-depends on the myth that money is a thing of substance.
In the case of currency, we need to believe that money has concrete meaning, if only because the alternative is unthinkable. As a psychoanalyst, my professional focus is on just that: the substitutes for truth we embrace when an emotional reality overwhelms our intellectual comprehension, when what we fear, or what we don’t understand, or what we want to change but can’t, becomes intolerable.
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