“Sigmund Freud would have been a wonderful witness here.  He would have explained the use of derivatives as denial and rationalization – the pretense that we are doing one thing when we really mean to do something else; the relationship between the banker and its client as one of ambivalence and reliance on the father figure; the use of accounting conventions as repression and the absence of reality testing; the work environment as the pleasure/pain principle – current pleasure for future damage, let someone else pick up the pieces; leveraging and doubling our bets as counter-phobic behavior; termination therapy as what happens when the CFO and Treasurer get caught; and, of course, transference – how the trader seeks to shift responsibility to his or her superior when the string runs out.”