Stuff (7 page)

Apart from Sartre, most of the writings about ownership in the twentieth century came from the social and biological sciences. In 1918, psychologist William James described "appropriation" or "acquisitiveness" as an instinct, something that is part of human nature, present at birth and with us throughout life. This instinct contributes to our sense of self. What is "me" fuses with what is "mine," and our "self" consists of what we possess. The use of instincts to explain behavior was in vogue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but fell out of fashion for several decades, only to revive again in the past few years thanks to increasingly sophisticated neuroscience research.

It is unclear whether the acquisition of possessions is instinctually or culturally driven, or both. What is clear is that notions of ownership vary widely across cultures, and acquisitive tendencies vary widely within cultures. In some early civilizations, possessions were seen as part of an individual's "life spirit" or self. Anthropologists have proposed this as the basic psychological process for ownership, which can be refined by cultural factors. Among the Manusians, an island tribe in Papua New Guinea described by Margaret Mead in 1930, this belief was readily apparent. They held possessions to be sacred and grieved for things lost as they would for lost loved ones. In contrast, the Tasaday of the Philippines, an isolated culture first discovered in the early 1970s, placed little value on possessions, perhaps because they needed few of them to survive.

By the middle of the twentieth century, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had developed a theory of character in which he suggested that acquiring things is one way that people relate to the world around them. He believed that acquisition forms a "core" aspect of character. Excessive acquisition, or what Fromm called a "hoarding orientation," is one of four types of "nonproductive" character. People with a hoarding orientation, he thought, gain their sense of security from collecting and saving things. Fromm described people with this orientation as withdrawn, compulsive, suspicious, remote from others, orderly, and overly concerned with cleanliness and punctuality. In his later writings, Fromm posited two contrasting aspects of existence: having and being. Having, or the state of avarice, he claimed, is the most destructive feature of humanity.

Classical psychoanalysts such as Karl Abraham viewed possessions as socially acceptable alternatives to saving excrement—parts of the self these analysts believed every child has the impulse to retain. According to Abraham, the child replaces the desire to retain feces with a more acceptable impulse—to acquire possessions. The more recent object relations school of psychoanalytic thought describes the situation slightly differently. Donald Winnicott introduced the phrase "transitional object" to refer to physical objects to which children form intense attachments as they develop autonomy from their parents. These objects (e.g., blankets, soft toys) are replacements for the mother and form a transition from mother to independence. Early on, the mother is able to soothe the child. At some point, the transitional object takes over that role until the child is old enough to soothe himself or herself. (My own daughter became attached to a blanket she named Mana. Though now in her twenties, she still takes Mana with her whenever she travels.)

Sigmund Freud said little about hoarding, but he did describe a trio of traits he believed result from an anal fixation: orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy. The parsimony component of the anal triad includes the hoarding of money: miserliness, or stinginess. Langley Collyer seemed to fit at least two of these traits, parsimony and obstinacy, although there is little evidence of his orderliness. Freud saw the hoarding of money as symbolic of fecal retention. Remnants of the "anal triad" can be seen in the current diagnostic criteria for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD). This disorder, which is distinct from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), also closely fits Fromm's description of people with a "hoarding orientation." For example, one of the eight criteria for OCPD is a preoccupation with details, rules, order, and organization; another is being stingy with money; and a third is being rigid and stubborn. Included among the eight is "the inability to discard worn-out or worthless objects even when they have no sentimental value." Objects in a hoard may appear to be without value to an observer, but someone with a hoarding problem would hardly describe them as worthless.

Only in the past three decades have scientists begun testing these theories with empirical research. Lita Furby, a pioneer researcher in the field of ownership and possessions, studied explanations for the things people own. She found three major themes among people of all ages. The first and most frequent was that possessions allow the owner to do or accomplish something. In other words, possessions provide a sense of personal power or efficacy. Possessions have instrumental value; they are tools to perform tasks. We need things to do things, to exert some control over our environment. This mirrors findings from our earliest study of hoarding, in which both our hoarding and non-hoarding participants said that they owned things because they had uses for them. Virtually all of our hoarding clients make this claim for things they save, but so do people who don't have hoarding problems. The difference between people who hoard and those who don't is in the volume and variety of things they view as "useful." For example, one elderly hoarder saved the labels from cans and jars of food to use as stationery.

Furby's second theme was that possessions provide a sense of security, reminiscent of Winnicott's transitional objects. This theme was also emphasized by Alfred Adler, an analyst who broke with classical psychoanalysis in suggesting that acquiring possessions is one way people compensate for a sense of inferiority created at birth. That inanimate objects can provide comfort was demonstrated by Harry Harlow's classic experiments with infant monkeys, who showed an innate preference for a soft, cloth surrogate mother over a wire-mesh one, even though the wire-mesh surrogate provided them with food and the cloth one didn't. When frightened, the monkeys ran to the soft surrogate, demonstrating that the texture of objects can provide comfort and security. Such comfort in objects led Irene to build a fortress of stuff and many of our clients to describe their homes as "cocoons" or "bunkers." One recent theory about hoarding by Stephen Kellett suggests that it evolved from attempts to create and maintain secure living sites, similar to nesting behaviors in animals.

The third major theme identified by Furby was that possessions become part of an individual's sense of self, just as Sartre believed. This kind of attachment can be subtle yet powerful. Objects can increase one's sense of status or power and expand one's potential: my purchase of a piano provides me with the potential to become a pianist, thereby expanding my identity. Objects can also maintain identity by preserving personal history. Most people save mementos of their personal past. These mementos become repositories for the sensations, thoughts, and emotions present during earlier experiences, promoting sensations such as the rush of nostalgia that can accompany hearing a song or smelling a scent from the past.

People collect and save objects as a hobby in virtually all cultures. The earliest documented evidence of collecting comes from excavations of the Persian tombs at Ur in what is now Iraq. A collection of eleven hundred seal impressions on lumps of clay found there date to the fifth century
B.C.E.
In contemporary society, of course, many people collect objects of various types, from antique cars to matchboxes. By one estimate, one-third of adults in the United States collect something, and two-thirds of all households have at least one collector in residence. Some people collect odd items, such as empty cigarette packs or coffee cans, and people join together as societies dedicated to certain kinds of collecting, from the American Philatelic Society (stamps) to the more unusual Victorian Button Collectors Club. In contrast to the very limited science about hoarding, research on collecting has a long history, mostly from the perspective of sociology, anthropology, and the economics of consumer behavior.

Exactly what makes something a collection or someone a collector is elusive. Virtually anything can be and has been collected, from stamps to swizzle sticks. But just how many swizzle sticks does it take to make a collection? Most scholars who study collecting seem to agree that a collection must be a set of objects, meaning more than one, and that the items must be related in some way—they must have some kind of cohesive theme. They also must be actively acquired, meaning there must be some kind of passion or fire to seek out and obtain them. Someone who simply receives gifts that otherwise fit the definition is not a collector.

The process of collecting can be quite elaborate. Some sociologists liken it to a courtship in which the collector spends considerable time planning the hunt for an object and anticipating the moment of acquisition. The objects in the collection, once acquired, must be removed from their typical use. This feature was made abundantly clear to me in college when I visited a friend's dorm room and sat down next to a pile of Marvel Comics still in their wrappers. I pulled one out and started reading it, only to be physically assaulted when my friend's roommate arrived and saw what I was doing. They were, he informed me in no uncertain terms, not meant to be read! Another feature of collecting is that the objects are organized in some way. In one of our first studies, we visited a woman who described herself as a pack rat, but most of her home was spotless and not only uncluttered but almost empty. In her basement, however, she had every newspaper clipping about the British royal family from every major newspaper in the United States. Boxes of these clippings were stacked to the ceiling and arranged in rows by year and family member.

The key features that define a collection seem to be that it involves more than one thing, the things have to be related somehow, and the things have to be acquired and organized in a certain way. That means the dozen pens and pencils in my desk drawer are not a collection because I simply dump them there whenever I find myself with another writing implement, and when I need to, I use them. But if I actively sought them out and acquired them, carefully organized them, and never or rarely used them (and didn't allow anyone else to use them either), they could be a collection. A collector, then, is anyone who has a collection.

Collectors come in all types and ages. Researchers in the field say that nearly all children collect things, sometimes beginning as early as age three. Not coincidentally, it is at that time that children begin to understand possessive pronouns such as "mine" and "yours." Interestingly, children's use of the word "mine" seems to occur before their use of the word "yours," usually between the ages of two and two and a half. When "yours" first enters the vocabulary, it is often in an attempt to convince someone that they already have something and should not pursue "mine."

In general, the knowledge that someone can own something reflects a sophisticated self-understanding. Children's first use of "mine" is frequently associated with physical aggression to get or retain a possession, but early use of possessive pronouns is also associated with more sharing behavior later on. Most children younger than two don't have a clear understanding of ownership.
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Passionate collectors spend a great deal of time doing things related to their collections. Exactly what they do has been a subject of interest to scholars studying collecting. According to some scholars, collectors follow a series of steps in collecting. The first of these is setting a goal of what to collect. Once this decision has been made, planning for the acquisition begins. A byproduct of the planning process is fantasizing about the object. The fantasies increase the object's subjective value and give it a magical quality, and soon the value of the object outstrips and becomes disconnected from any functional utility it may have. Next comes the hunt, frequently the most pleasurable part of collecting. Many collectors shift from a self-focused state to what some have described as a "flow state," a mental state in which the person is so absorbed in the activity that he or she is unaware of his or her surroundings—commonly experienced by an athlete at the height of physical exertion or by someone immersed in a game or project.

Watching a passionate collector at a flea market makes it clear that his or her state of consciousness is altered during "the hunt." The person has little appreciation for anything going on around him or her; only the pursuit matters. When the acquisition occurs, it is accompanied by a wave of euphoria and appreciation of the object's features, which become part of the "story" of the acquisition. Finally, the excited collector catalogs the object and adds it to the collection, arranging for its display. Often subtle rituals accompany newly acquired objects. For instance, Freud used to place new acquisitions on his dining room table so that he could admire them while he ate.

Some people collect out of a desire for an aesthetic, others for prestige, and still others for a sense of mastery. But most theories of collecting elaborate on attempts to define, protect, or enhance the self. This is borne out by people's reactions to losing things to natural disasters or thievery. Most burglary victims feel that they have been violated, and many women liken it to being raped.

Anthropologists have described cultural practices in which people connect themselves to objects by licking or touching them. Likewise, the grieving in some cultures over the possessions of a deceased loved one demonstrates the extent to which a possession can be considered an extension of personal identity. This is the same phenomenon we observed with my students and Jerry Seinfeld's shirt. The connection between the object and its former owner transcends rationality. It is symbolic and magical.

Many collectors think of their collections as a legacy to pass on to their heirs or even the world. Some, especially art collectors and collectors of historical artifacts, donate their collections to museums or create their own museums for posterity. This has led some scholars to suggest that collecting is a way of managing fears about death by creating a form of immortality. This is consistent with a popular theory in social psychology called the terror management theory (TMT). TMT grows out of an existential predicament—that people, like animals, are mortal. But unlike animals, we are aware of our own mortality. Knowledge of the inevitability of death and its unpredictability can produce paralyzing fear. To cope with this potential terror, cultures provide beliefs, rituals, and sanctioned strategies for managing it. One of these strategies is the belief that some part of ourselves can live on after we die. Producing or amassing something of value is one way to accomplish this. Thus a collection offers the potential for immortality.