This week, delegates at the Republican National Convention will decide whether the GOP should officially contemplate a return to the gold standard. Among plutocrat investor types the policy makes some sense—by pegging the dollar to the world’s gold supply, government spending remains in check, inflation stays down, and Uncle Scrooge’s piles of cash don’t lose their value. For everyone else, as my colleague Noam Scheiber argues, this brand of monetary policy makes no sense. So why has it caught on?

Noam supposes that Tea Party goldbugs are suffering from false consciousness, a misunderstanding of their material circumstances. For my part, I would suggest examining the GOP's potential unconscious motivations. Would Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, have anything to say about Republicans' gold obsession?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. The GOP's embrace of the gold standard isn't just a reversion back to nineteenth century monetary theory, it seems. It's also a regression back to psychological infancy.

Freud drew a connection between adults' covetousness of gold and babies' obsession with poop. “Freud had an idea that in the unconscious mind, that money and perhaps gold in particular, was equivalent to some kind of shit. Excremental substance,” New York City psychoanalyst Steven Poser told me.

According to Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, a turning point in a child’s so-called “anal phase” is the moment at which he is taught to use the bathroom, wherein he is forced to relinquish his droppings to his parents—or worse, to the sewer. “A baby has a predisposition to hold on to things,” Long Island University professor of psychology Geoff Goodman tells me. “That includes feces. When you give that up—you lose part of yourself.”