Dr. Jim Grubman: On Working with High Net Worth Individuals with Psychological "Impairments"

By Obliquity

A friend, an inheritor, sent me a link to Dr. Jack Grubman, as a possible resource. He is one of a growing cadre of psychologists specializing in the mental and emotional ills to which wealth is prone.

These psychological areas are important for the financial professional to understand and know how to manage. Dr. Grubman coaches financial advisers about psychological aspects of wealth management along with consultation about the impaired client. He teaches in the Masters Program in Financial Planning at the McCallum Graduate School of Business at Bentley College (Massachusetts). His course, Psychology in Financial Planning, covers the psychology of money, basic behavioral finance, and client relationship skills.

"Well and good," said the Happy Tutor, Dungeon Master to the Stars, when I mentioned Dr Grubman to him. "A lot of wealthy people are deranged, but it is a moral disease best cured the old fashioned way, with a scourge, scalpal or pillory."  That is Tutor for you, always trying to drum up business for what he calls "Our Noble Trade." We all have to make a living somehow and there are enough morally impaired rich people to go around. That is what I like about working in philanthropy. You get to help rich lunatics pass on their family values and remake the world in their own image.  Why cure them when you can serve them?

The Literal for Those Readers Who Need It

Actually, working with persons of wealth and their families as human beings with all the ills to which humans are heir is important work. Getting a pyschologist on the team is often an important step in helping a person or a family build and implement and communicate a worthwhile plan for the family's personal or dynastic ambitions. What goes unspoken in the financial industry, allied disciplines, and indeed our culture, and the point this post tries to make through obliquity, is that hubris, for example, is not only a mental illness, it is a moral fault, one that can bring a polity down. Pride, vanity, intolerance, megalomania, narcissism - are these diseases? Or moral deformties? We need to be able to do more than palliate and treat the symptons of a system that is failing us because of its over-estimation of the importance of money, and we need to find in ourselves and root out, the habits of mindless courtesy and deference to those who make this world go in its current direction because, however sick they may be, they have the money, the power, the entourage and the following to make their views prevail. (I hate to be so literal, but not all readers can read at the AP English level, and probably, since I have mentioned a real psychologist , I owe it to him to be explicit. Heal the sick, Doctor, but as a citizen consider with The Happy Tutor what we must do with the wealty reprobates if we are to purge and heal the Body Politic in which they play such an important role!)

Comments

[Juke Moran]

Money whispers of other worlds, abstract places where corporeal strength means nothing, where age is a disease and children, like the other powerless minorities, don't really exist.
Like mathematics it's real, like mathematics it isn't.
There's a particular demonic form that uses the illusion of temporal existence - the undisputable fact that we don't live anywhere in time, but pass through it - to argue away loyalty to things outside the self. What else is there it says, when nothing lasts, nothing stays, nothing is? Nothing but the self.
Money comes between us and the things of the world, even as it brings them closer, or promises to. The images of Chinese factories, with hundreds of identical workers in identical roles in vast inhuman artificial spaces, illustrate the deceptive abundance of mere efficiency - food production stripped of its timbre and harmony, outside the circle of life.
R.D. Laing clarified the riddle of sanity in a sick environment. For creatures who need social bonds and a place within the group, mental health can be a pathology - when the group itself is ill.
The danger is every phase of the disease produces a median, and above it a set of beneficiaries who will see the way things are as basically appropriate. Doubt and confusion, an unquiet conscience however vestigial, nagging unfocused guilt - sometimes these are good signs. Human signals.
Helping people adapt to an immoral and inhuman way of life isn't healing them.

[Phil]

What is the cure for what ails the rich involved separating them from their money?

[Juke Moran]

What's the cure that allows everyone to just feel good all the time?
What's the cure that involves everyone just feeling better and better all the time?
There isn't one.
What we have here is the triumph of shlubness.
The gloating little bastard that ate up all the seed corn and put himself up on top of everything by virtue of being so well-fed.
There's only recognition, that awful thing in the mirror with the shocked and horrified look on its face - truth coming in for a landing at its airport in the brain.
No mercy, no forgiveness, no remorse, no way out. For free, anyway. Any real solutions are going to cost you.
Verification that the guidance and healing you seek are here will become available once the non-disclosure forms are signed and advance payment for the first three sessions is received.
Fees for service are a mundane necessity, though ours will be determined on a sliding(upward) scale. We have overhead just like everyone else does, and fees are a concrete symbol of a commitment to the therapeutic process.
The misuse of money by those unsuited to its potencies should in no wise impugn the character of those manifestly able to augment their own abilities with its particular forms of social energy without diminishing the steady augmentation of human potential toward which wealth has always been just one more indicator of a superior contribution, individual and familial.

[Phil]

Therapy seems most often to take either self or family as the "system" to be analyzed and adjusted, but often what passes for depression, say, may be anomie; and the ills that surface in a given person, rich or poor, may be like boils on the body politic, or like hives, an overt manisfestion of a suppressed problem that it taken to be "to big to think about."

Financial, tax and legal people, likewise, take as their client those who pay them or who control the assets that the advisor hopes to manage.

Who speaks for the greater good?

Well, you could say charities do. But their appeal is narrow. They speak for their own organization, in raising money.

What interests me is the role on the planning team of advocate for the donor/clients "best self," or "better angel," his or her best, and earned, consideration not only of how to live a happier life, in the American sense, of having more and enjoying more, but in the Greek sense of a life well lived in a role that includes public contribution and service.

"What are your responsibilities?"

"What is the role of wealth in your life? In your family's affairs?"

"What is the role of wealth in a good, just or sustainable society?"

"How can you align your resources with your ideals so as to make the world better by your own standards?"

Those kind of questions are Socratic. They take any given citizen just so far and no farther. But they are "therapy" as Socratic reasoning always was, not as Freud was.

Many clients may need both. But therapy is no substitute for critical thinking about one's own civic responsibilities.

[J. Alva Scruggs]

"What interests me is the role on the planning team of advocate for the donor/clients "best self," or "better angel," his or her best, and earned, consideration not only of how to live a happier life, in the American sense, of having more and enjoying more, but in the Greek sense of a life well lived in a role that includes public contribution and service."

Phil, perhaps that's all there is to be done. I had thought thinking along that line naive at one point, but the argument for its realism looks increasingly strong. I don't envy you regardless.

[Phil]

Naive implies lack of experience or realism; that is not my problem. I am not proposing this as a potential business model, or a way to make a living. I am saying that such was the way of Socrates, Diogenes, Thoreau, Kierkegaard. I am trying to place what we do in planning for gifts with ethical, philosophicial, and political traditions that are deeper. In the light of those traditons, of the Tricksters and the Clown, you learn what you are and what you dare not be. To challenge a "client" you must both put off your roles and meet as citizens. Perhaps that is the essence of being a citizen.

[J. Alva Scruggs]

Phil, I find that response a bit frustrating and am concerned that I came off insulting. I wasn't calling _you_ naive or unrealistic. I think it's a fine idea, though I'm not absolutely, totally, 100% sure it's going to work. That reflects not at all on you, but does reflect my jaded view of the client class. That's all.

[phil]

Please, Mr. Scruggs. I am not easily offended by thoughtful comments. Of course it is going to work. The whole idea is preposterous. That is the point. A guy who walks around Athens stark naked and lives in a Dumpster, accosting the rich and powerful, and matching wits with them, does not have "a business plan." What he is doing is like a Zen monk's slap. Detournement. Or it is like the Fool's antics, or Carnival. When Christ played the Fool with is parables, did he has a workable business model? If so, it got him crucified. I appreciate your pressing the point, because it is fundamental. What the Tooterish posts do is to continue a tradition that is largely dead, that of confronting wealthy people to save their souls, despite themselves.

Art, said Horace, holds the mirror up to nature. But the mirror he held up to the winners of this world was often satirical, though urbane. He got away with it, even in the court of the Emperor, but the art of living to old age as a Fool or Satirist, or public moralist is the art of survival, and not all make it.

We sometimes do what we do not to advance our own interests, but to help others, even if it requires some risk of self-sacrifice. Tutor lives in a Dumpster as symbolic renunciation of "success" and all it stands for, as Jesus was born in a manger, or a monk takes vows of poverty, or Diogenes goes naked.

Again: Unless you break the rules of the conversation about money, it will always move about among the same stupid points, ones we have all heard millions of times. I an not trying to win within the rules, but - insolently - to overturn the money changers table and whip them from the Temple.

Or at least to do that, and then invite them back on terms that include the holy spirit. They can enter, and ply their necessary trade, but they may not supercede the Gospel, or distract from the message. Instead they can work on the vestry committee, raising funds for the new roof.

[ambulance nurse]

I think greed is the most common illness. But how can it be cured?

[Phil]

Cashectomy.

[Dr. Jim Grubman]

Interesting thread. Someone suggested I check out the blog and its reference to me. By the way, please note I am Jim Grubman, not Jack Grubman - Jack is the well-known, or perhaps notorious Wall St. analyst whose tips on Internet investments did give many a "cashectomy". I don't know him, and he may be a distant relative since there are few Grubmans in the world, but I do wish to be careful about the association.

I like the comments that therapy needs also to have a social conscience. My work, and that of other wealth counselors, tries to focus on helping people find not only meaning but value to their money. Not infrequently this leads to their choosing to do philanthropy or social action, using their wealth effectively for others.

[Phil]

Thank you for the good natured response. I corrected your name. The kind of work you do is of great value in the planning process for families who are "stuck." We in no way mean to demean that essential role. How wealth and care of the wealthy, though, comports with democracy is one of those topics that is taboo. You could call this blog "self-therapy," trying to get at what we do when we make the wishes, needs, functions and dysfunctions of the wealthy central to our practice, our lives, and our society. Can a wealthy person we both well and selfish? Both fuliflled and without compassion? Philosophy, moral philosophy, political philosophy diverged in the eighteen century, yet they were once once discipline, and maybe still are. "Well-adjusted" wealth-holders - what does that mean for those of us whose poverty or subordination is that is to which they are adjusted? Can smooth psycyhological functioning be stripped of its moral dimensions? I wish these issues were more open for discussion, so I took a chance and used this post as a way to try. Thank your for not taking offense or seeing it as "personal." It is about what we share, our respective roles, in the family wealth counsellng trades.

I truly applaud your efforts to awken cients to the better angels of their nature.

[Dr. Jim Grubman]

Thanks. Finding that balance between money and good values is important for everyone, no matter what level of wealth. Keep at it!