The shadow in the balance sheet: The spectre of Enron and how accountants use the past as a psychological defence against the future

Accounting frameworks play a crucial role in enabling us to make sense of business. These frameworks provide a common language for individuals, organizations and broader economic groupings to understand and make decisions about the commercial realm in which they operate. From a psychodynamic perspective, the language of accounting also plays an important role. On the one hand it offers a way to tame the uncertainty and unknowability of the future by representing it in the same comforting terms as it does the past, thus reducing anxiety. Accounting provides a ‘shorthand’, which achieves a balance between positive and negative, debit and credit, asset and liability. On the other hand, accounting can also provide an arena in which fantasies about the future can be staged. However, the use of accounting language is problematic, particularly when it comes to dealing with the future. First, accounting frameworks are inherently backward looking and second, the reassuring sense of clarity and predictability they give are bought at the price of unrealistic simplification. The shadow is never far away and is a constant source of surprises in the unfolding future of a business. Rationalizing and sanitizing the shadow through accounting language may alleviate anxiety but fails to provide an escape from its effects, and echoes from the shadow side of business are capable of shaking the world in the form of accounting scandals. Governments and businesses have reacted to scandals such as Enron and Worldcom by tightening legislation and refining accounting standards but little, if anything, has been done to bring us any closer to confronting the shadow of business where these scandals have their r

Emotional economic man:Calculation and anxiety management in investment decision making

Dominant theorisations of investment decision making remain firmly wedded to the notion of economic rationality, either as a postulate of how financial actors actually behave or as a normative ideal to which financial actors should strive. However, such frameworks have been developed largely without engaging financial market participants themselves. Based on 51 in-depth interviews with fund managers in various global financial centres, this article highlights a number of features of investment decision making that mainstream finance and behavioural approaches both fail adequately to describe. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, it is shown how the inherent uncertainty of the investment process engenders a state of endemic anxiety among fund managers. This anxiety is managed via a range of mental defences, both conscious and unconscious. The importance fund managers place on meeting and putting trust in company management to ‘perform’ for them can equally be viewed as a means of alleviating anxiety rather than having any direct economic purpose. This article, furthermore, brings to light the crucial role that calculative techniques play in dealing with anxiety. Rather than constituting a means of restoring rationality or correcting cognitive biases, calculation can actually reinforce ego defences while simultaneously perpetuating the myth of homo economicus. Fund managers can be characterised as ‘doing’ but ‘not doing’ and ‘knowing’ but ‘choosing not to know’ and have to manage not only their clients' funds, but their own personal anxiety as well

Emotional finance : investment and the unconscious

Unconscious mental processes are ubiquitous. However, little attention has been paid in the finance literature to date to how people’s unconscious fantasies, needs and desires help drive their investment decisions, and markets more generally. Emotional finance which is informed by the psychoanalytic understanding of the human mind sets out to explore such issues directly. This paper first describes the underlying theory and then examines some of its potential insights and empirical applications. How emotional finance more generally may help explain asset pricing bubbles and the Global Financial Crisis is also discussed, as well as the paradox the asset management industry represents. Recognising that investors are often driven by not-always conscious emotions of excitement, anxiety and denial, and markets by parallel collusive group-wide processes, this paper concludes by suggesting that the key role unconscious mental processes play in all human activity is worthy of greater attention in finance. Appropriate research methodologies and the way forward in terms of future work are also outlined

Emotional finance and the psychodynamics of markets

Little attention is paid in the finance literature to how people’s unconscious fantasies, needs and desires help drive their investment decisions, and markets more generally. Some of the theory underpinning the new domain of emotional finance, which is informed by the psychoanalytic understanding of the human mind and group processes, is first outlined. This is then applied in helping explain asset pricing bubbles and the global financial crisis, as well as the paradox the asset management industry itself represents, all of which conventional finance theory finds difficulty in explaining in any convincing way. The paper concludes by suggesting that were we to recognise more formally the key role our inner world plays in the workings of financial markets, destructive and potentially pathological outcomes might be ameliorated