21 Aug Shrink Rap: Gertrude Stein’s “Ida, Reflections on an identity of wealth”
A Telluride local, Dr. Paul Hokemeyer is an internationally recognized expert on treating clinical issues at the nexus of relationships and behavioral health. (Please scroll down for more about Dr. Paul)
The second edition of Dr. Paul’s terrific book “Fragile Power” was published in 2024. Go here to read more about the first edition of “Fragile Power.”
Go here to read more of Dr. Paul’s pearls. We curated the following from the August 16 edition of his Drayson Mews newsletter.
Dr. Paul, courtesy Lodha
Gertrude Stein’s “Ida” is a strange, elusive, and surprisingly contemporary novel about a woman whose identity becomes inseparable from the public’s need to invent her.
“Ida” is beautiful, famous, wealthy-adjacent, and continuously observed. Yet Stein refuses to give us a view into the inner person who lives below the veneer of her life. Instead, Ida appears through repetition, rumor, projection, names, images, and other people’s accounts of who she is.
The result is unsettling: “Ida” seems to belong less to herself than to the world that watches her.
For those of us who work at the intersection of wealth, identity, mental and relational health, this tale feels deeply familiar.
Wealth as a Public Identity
Money is often described as a private matter.
Psychologically, however, substantial wealth is rarely private. It changes how others perceive a person, how institutions respond to them, whom they can trust, and what people assume about their capacities, motives, and obligations.
Like Stein’s Ida, a person of great means often becomes an object of others’ projections.
These others may see in substantial wealth unfair privilege and access, abused power, narcissistic entitlement, and reasons to resent and demonize those who possess what they long for.
They may also see someone who should be immune to ordinary suffering.
In this complex conscious and unconscious process, the actual person of wealth—their anxieties, grief, ambivalence, loneliness, dependency needs, and developmental vulnerabilities — can be eclipsed behind the projections they place on people of wealth, power, and celebrity.
The family system adapts around these dynamics too.
Children learn what they can and cannot say. Spouses and partners become uncertain whether love is freely given or financially conditioned. Friends may feel indebted, intimidated, competitive, or dependent. Advisors can become excessively deferential. Everyone begins relating not only to the person, but to the wealth surrounding them.
The Problem of the Performed Self
Stein understood that identity is not simply something one possesses. It is also something that is performed, narrated, reflected back, and maintained in the eyes of others.
This is one of the central psychological costs of affluence and celebrity: the need to continually manage a public self.
People who have inherited, created, or married into significant wealth often feel pressured to be a particular kind of person —competent, grateful, discreet, generous, invulnerable, successful, or perpetually composed. The more visible the identity, the harder it can be to acknowledge uncertainty or need.
This pressure can produce a particular form of isolation. A person may be surrounded by attention and still feel fundamentally unknown.
In clinical work, the question is rarely whether wealth causes suffering. Wealth plainly offers options, access, and protection from many forms of material insecurity.
The more meaningful question is: What has this person had to become in order to live inside the story that wealth has created around them?
Ida’s Lesson
Ida reminds us that a life can become so organized around appearances that the individual’s interior world becomes difficult to locate—even to the individual herself.
That is not merely a literary problem. It is a clinical one.
The work of therapy, and of healthy family dialogue, is to make room for the person beneath the role: beneath the family name, the balance sheet, the inheritance, the public image, the carefully managed reputation, and the expectations of others.
The work of therapy, and of healthy family dialogue, is to make room for the person beneath the role: beneath the family name, the balance sheet, the inheritance, the public image, the carefully managed reputation, and the expectations of others.
This does not mean rejecting privilege or denying the real responsibilities that accompany wealth. It means developing an identity capacious enough to hold both reality and humanity.
A psychologically mature relationship to wealth allows someone to say:
• “My resources shape my life, but they are not the whole of me.”
• “I can be admired without confusing admiration for intimacy.”
• “I can have privilege and still have pain.”
• “I can belong to a family story without being imprisoned by it.”
Gertrude Stein’s “Ida” remains compelling because she captures a modern dilemma: what happens when the world knows your image before it knows you?
For individuals and families of wealth, the answer matters profoundly. The task is not simply to preserve assets or manage reputation. It is to protect the conditions under which an authentic self-and authentic relationships can survive.
Let’s not forget that mental health and relational wellbeing matter – for everyone, everywhere.
Thank you for being a trusted colleague on this journey.
With warm regards,
Dr. Paul
Dr. Paul, more:
Paul Hokemeyer, J.D., Ph.D. is the founding principal of Drayson Mews, an international behavioural health firm based in London and author of “FragilePower: Why Having Everything Is Never Enough,” (Hazelden, 2019), the seminal resource for UHNW and high-performance individuals looking for clinically excellent mental and relational health services.
A licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Dr. Paul is a graduate of the Global Leaders in Health Care program at Harvard Medical School and studied the use of digital technologies to enhance the delivery of mental health and addiction treatment services at the Yale School of Management.
Dr. Paul serves as a clinical consultant to the London based Ispahani Advisory Limited and is a Clinical Fellow at the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists.
In addition to his legal and mental health background, Dr. Paul has extensive experience in the realm of philanthropy through his work as a trustee of a family foundation, and the Palm Springs Art Museum, one of the world’s leading institutions for midcentury design and art.
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