After all, money is nothing more nor less than a medium of exchange—without any intrinsic value itself. Or so the economists tell us. We carry money in our pockets and transact with it passively, automatically: Buy the muffin, pay the toll, slide the debit or credit card across the counter.
Money is neutral—a facilitator. So why is there an epidemic of money madness—and how does the contagion work?
The simple answer is that money madness isn't really about money at all. It's about emotion. It's about intensely subjective feelings that come out of a place very deep within us and go right past the conscious mind as they drive us to act in certain ways. As I learned through years of analyzing and working through my own and my clients’ money madness, it starts in childhood, yet it has the power to affect us all our adult lives.
- Spencer Sherman, The Cure for Money Madness
