Abstract

Psychotherapeutic reports and empirical interview studies of inheritors of wealth have found that many experience their wealth as a burden as well as a blessing. Previous reports have ascribed a major part of the difficulties to wealth's interference with normal parent-child interaction at various points along the developmental continuum--thus inherited wealth is seen as resulting ironically in a deficit for the recipient. ;This study explores the psychological and moral dilemma of inherited wealth by reconceptualizing an inheritance as a gift. Anthropological data and theories of gift exchange in pre-modern economies are reviewed to explore the demands which gifts place on the gifted. ;The institution of inheritance has always been regarded ambivalently by American society. The social and economic impacts of inherited wealth contribute to the tension individual inheritors feel about the issue of deserving or justifying their good fortune. ;Psychoanalytical and anthropological theories of the origins of money reveal a history of increasing alienation as commodity exchange supplanted the earlier gift economy. The gift relation is shown by moral philosophy to be an important constituent of contemporary society, as the duty to return favors is seen to underlie much of what is valued in social relations. By receiving a gift of wealth, the inheritor is simultaneously thrown into a gift cycle which reaches for connection and yet is alientated from others by virtue of wealth. ;When inheritance is seen as a gift, the dilemma of the recipient becomes that of making the return gift. The inner labor of accepting, transforming, and returning a gift are considered, as are the ways in which this process can become stalled or distorted by mistakenly identifying special qualities of the self as justification for the gift. It is argued that the psychological difficulties of inheritors are made more uuderstandable, and perhaps better treated psychotherapeutically, by an increasing attention to the inheritor's need to resolve the conflict of unearned wealth by finding ways to give