Emotional bailout1

The current and lingering economic crisis and financial meltdown has affected everyone. The worldwide recession, foreclosures, increasing unemployment, deterrents to lending, borrowing, and business expansion have affected everyone. It is useful to draw saome parallels between the financial scene and accepted psychological medels, processes and treatment. Only a thumbnail sketch is pressnted here.

Financial capital has its personality counterpart in emotional resources, or what psychoanalysts label ego strength. Money or credit is required to grease the wheels of commerce and business. Ego resouces are required to cope with crises and internal conflict. Liquidity, or the ability to generate monies for business expansion, can be compared with emotional lability needed to respond appropriately, not excessively to external stressors. Confidence in government, leaders, previously valued banks and corporations, and the "American dream," translate into processes of trust in others. Histrically acceptaed support systems --banks, Bernake, Buffet, our homes, and government regulation are perceived as having failed us. Conflicts between advocates of freemarkets and those seeking rescue by the Federal Big Brother are reminiscent of Skinner's battle between free will and determinminm. Any Rand surfaces again.

Clinical syndromes of anxiety and panoic, depression and helplessness, phobias and avoidance behaviors, obsesssive compulsive symptoms have not been confined to psychaitric clinics, hospitals, and consulting roooms and are now commonplace on Wall Street and Main Street. Cognitive and emotional processes are apparent in
in speculators,investors and savers alike and include denial and delusional systems, anger and attribution of blame, loss of trust (e.g., consumer confidence), and attachment.Concepts of risk, expectancy of success, and incentive have direct application in business decision making.

Treatment models for treating anxiety, depression, anger, disturbed and irrational thinking, hysteria, and learned helplessness seem now to be equally relevant to the marketplace. The new emphasis upon positive psychology, heralded by Martin Seligman, may be directly applicable on a national level for a healthy emotional bailout
of our citizenry. We need to embrace concepts of resilience, optimism, and the setting of realistic emotional as well as financial goals. We need to learn ways for turning negatives into positives, to diversify our emotional as well as our financial assets, to avoid despair, sadness, and bitterness, to combat stress with a well oiled emotional immune system. Time is a friend of personality integration as well as financial recovery. Regression toward the mean applies eventially to financial markets. There is no certainty, only opportunity.