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Andrew Carnegie who, in response to the question, how much is enough?, was fond of saving, "A little bit more." Then again, Carnegie was also fond of the saying "To die rich is to die disgraced" and donated most of his fortune to building public libraries across America. His relationship to money was clearly very odd.
Lami would have put him straight on the couch: "A lot of my patients have an inner sense of void," she says. "They think if they don't work any more, they won't have anything left." Plenty of her patients are entrepreneurs who have sold their companies and collected a small fortune but have subsequently been left bewildered and lost in a world where they don't have any decisions to make or people to boss around. "They get this big cheque for their business and then they are saying to themselves, 'Well, what next?"'
Good question. One Lami solution: get them to spend more time with their families and children, and start them working for charities. Also, get them to walk barefoot through the park. Why barefoot? "Because it allows them to reconnect with the earth," she says. "I think that's good for people."
It's the first overt sign of California-style psychobabble from this very unusual therapist. On one level, treating the rich for the trauma of excessive wealth may seem a trivial occupation. They may have problems, one is tempted to think, but they aren't real problems like the sort suffered by single mothers on sink housing estates or disturbed teenagers sleeping rough on the streets. Aftluenza, surely, can easily be dismissed as the self-indulgent 'condition' of having- too much time, too much money and not enough real stuff to worry about.
Lami is conscious of that charge but doesn't buy it. "The truth is, this is an internal experience," she says. "People seem to think that if you have money you are not an ordinary human being, that you don't suffer. That isn't so. They suffer as much as anyone else."
She has some sympathy herself with her patients, if only from a reverse psychology point of view. |
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Lami comes from a family that made money in the textiles trade; she grew up expecting that she would never have to work for a living. When the family fortune started to shrivel, she realized she would not be as wealthy as she had imagined and had to start standing on her own two feet.
In the end, the trouble with curing affluenza might be, as Woody Allen observed in Annie Hall, that you need the eggs. It is precisely the kind of driven, paranoid characters who end up making big money and then wind up in the office of someone like Lami. Rightly or wrongly, free-market capitalism saves its big prizes for obsessive. A global economy in which all the entrepreneurs and wealth creators underwent chill-out therapy would not necessarily be any more prosperous. It might well be a lot poorer. And then none of us would be happy.
For more information or a brochure, contact Dr Ronit Lami on 020 7318 6343 or Hugo Cox on 020 73186340, or go to www.affluenza-and-wealth.com |
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| ARE YOU SUFFERING FROM AFFLUENZA? |
| 1. |
Do you think you would feel happier with more money? |
| 2. |
Do you see the overnight office cleaner more than your kids? |
| 3. |
Do you eschew GMTV for CNBC? |
| 4. |
Do you shop till you drop, even on Sunday? |
| 5. |
Is your wealth a result of a sudden windfall? |
| 6. |
Do you take your laptop on holiday? |
| 7. |
Do you constantly discuss how much your friends paid for their flats or houses? |
| 8. |
And do you often worry that your `friends? are really gold-diggers? |
| 9. |
Have your family relations deteriorated as your income has risen? |
| 10. |
Do you skip articles like this and turn straight to the glossy ads? |
| If your answers were mostly yes, you need treatment. |
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