This, as Keynes himself once pointed out (though failing to see the extent to which it was true), links Keynes's understanding of the motivation dominant in capitalism to Marx's. The latter's conception of M-C-M' is underpinned by a conception of capitalist motivation as dominated by an irrational love of money as a possession (as in the passage I recently posted setting out the role of auri sacra fames in the early political economy of the monetary and mercantilist systems).
The role Marx gives to this in the panic of a "monetary crisis" is very similar to the role Keynes gives in his implicitly psychoanalytic account of a liquidity crisis.
"Under conditions of advanced bourgeois production, when the commodity-owner has long since become a capitalist, knows his Adam Smith and smiles superciliously at the superstition that only gold and silver constitute money or that money is after all the absolute commodity as distinct from other commodities -- money then suddenly appears not as the medium of circulation but once more as the only adequate form of exchange-value, as a unique form of wealth just as it is regarded by the hoarder. The fact that money is the sole incarnation of wealth manifests itself in the actual devaluation and worthlessness of all physical wealth, and not in purely imaginary devaluation as for instance in the Monetary System. This particular phase of world market crises is known as monetary crisis. The summum bonum, the sole form of wealth for which people clamour at such times, is money, hard cash, and compared with it all other commodities -- just because they are use-values -- appear to be useless, mere baubles and toys, or as our Doctor Martin Luther says, mere ornament and gluttony. This sudden transformation of the credit system into a monetary system adds theoretical dismay to the actually existing panic, and the agents of the circulation process are overawed by the impenetrable mystery surrounding their own relations. [6]" <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ ch02_3b.htm>
"The function of money as the means of payment implies a contradiction without a terminus medius. In so far as the payments balance one another, money functions only ideally as money of account, as a measure of value. In so far as actual payments have to be made, money does not serve as a circulating medium, as a mere transient agent in the interchange of products, but as the individual incarnation of social labour, as the independent form of existence of exchange-value, as the universal commodity. This contradiction comes to a head in those phases of industrial and commercial crises which are known as monetary crises. [49] Such a crisis occurs only where the ever-lengthening chain of payments, and an artificial system of settling them, has been fully developed. Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes suddenly and immediately transformed, from its merely ideal shape of money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are money. But now the cry is everywhere: money alone is a commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth. [50] In a crisis, the antithesis between commodities and their value-form, money, becomes heightened into an absolute contradiction. Hence, in such events, the form under which money appears is of no importance. The money famine continues, whether payments have to be made in gold or in credit money such as bank- notes. [51]"
"Why should anyone outside a lunatic asylum wish to use money as a store of wealth?
"Because, partly on reasonable and partly on instinctive grounds, our desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the future. Even though this feeling about money is itself conventional or instinctive, it operates, so to speak, at a deeper level of our motivation. It takes charge at the moments when the higher, more precarious conventions have weakened. The possession of actual money lulls our disquietude; and the premium which we require to make us part with money is the measure of the degree of our disquietude." Keynes, Collected Writings, vol. XIV, p. 116
Psychoanalysis is involved in the role given to "instinctive grounds" elaborated as an "instinctive or conventional" "feeling about money" that "operates, so to speak at a deeper level of our motivation" and that "takes charge at the moments when the higher, more precarious conventions [e.g. invalid obsessional mathematical modeling] have weakened."
Ted