MIND MOVES Marie MurrayPeople are divided into two distinct categories with regard to possessions: the hoarders and the discarders, each of whom expresses their psychological status through their relationship with possessions.
Hoarders snaffle, store and smother their homes with the significant and the sentimental. Discarders dispose of it all. What hoarders regard as precious, discarders regard as life's detritus. By these behaviours it is suggested that hoarders cling to the past while discarders reject it.
While hoarders and discarders embrace a philosophy of living, they are opposites in how they live, with distinct behavioural repertoires. Each inhabit homes that reveal their assignment as collectors, investors, rejecters or ejectors from the first glimpse of the possessions that surround them, or lack thereof.
Hoarders and discarders view each other suspiciously as separate emotional species, because being one or the other is not just a matter of taste. It is a matter of far more complex psychological significance.
From this psychological perspective, why one hoards or why one discards is the issue. The answer establishes whether the pattern of hoarding or discarding is one of psychological adjustment or pathological difficulty. The extremity of the behaviour determines the severity of the diagnosis!
In the heart of each hoarder lies a person who knows that not to retain every object of emotional, archival or potential monetary value would evoke great anxiety and distress. Hoarders squirrel possessions, preserve memorabilia.
Each object carries a story, happy or sad, evidence of life and love, insurance for the winter of old age against the loneliness of isolation. Albums and objects of remembrance are retained to counteract the barrenness of being forgotten. Utensils are stored when there may be no money to buy the things one needs.
In the heart of the discarder lies a person who wonders if minimalism is miserly or an attempt to hide and disguise "selfhood" by discarding all clues to personality, preference, possession, or the past. Not for the minimalist the photos of family on the mantel, the fridge cluttered with children's drawings, mementoes, mess and kitsch. From a clinical perspective, hoarders may be logical, sentimental or guilt driven. The logical hoarder knows that time determines the value of objects; that today's tack is tomorrow's profit. Often these hoarders are creative, lateral thinkers who imagine myriad uses for an object so that to discard one is to reject the potential multiple purposes a single object may provide.
However, the hoarder needs to consider why tangible evidence of life is required. It is proposed that this archival need may stem from childhood deprivation of the memorabilia and photographs people require to record their existence before their own memory can do so.
High among hoarders may be those, bereaved, adopted or fostered in infancy, for whom objects provide identity or whose history is denied by their absence. In the absence of inheritance objects are significant. Yet with ironic twist, the children of sentimental hoarders, overwhelmed by excessive documentation of their lives, reject the "recording" process, the films and photos that deny their enjoyment of living in the service of evidence of how their lives were lived.
Meanwhile, the guilty hoarder is a product of the 'waste not want not' time, when no money was available to replace things broken and when need, not fashion dictated what a person wore.
And whether we are hoarders or discarders may also depend on the messages of childhood, cultural messages about taste and waste or prior experiences of poverty or luxury, which may dictate whether objects are "things" held in high regard or utensils to use and discard.
Discarders may be logical, anxious or angry. Logical discarders understand that a new possession in limited space requires removal of the old. It is as psychologically simple and straightforward as that.
But the anxious or angry discarder should consider if fear of retention is fear of memory or of commitment. Ruthless ejection of keepsakes, like constant redecoration of home, may suggest discomfort with marking one's space, claiming one's personal style, or declaring an identity other than fashion dictated planned obsolescence wherein the self is erased by "good taste".
What is my most precious possession? What are the other objects with which I surround or do not allow myself and why? What value do I place on them? Is this determined by the giver, the spirit in which they were given or by their monetary worth? What emotions are attached to the things I own? Which remind me of something, of someone or some time of significance in my life? If I could retain only three objects what would I choose?
Either way, our possessions provide psychological insight into the self. Past and present, interests and activities are evident in the litter of our lives. The need to have confronts having no needs: the simplicity of "enough" challenges the burden of excess. The balance we keep on what we keep is one signifier of psychological health. To shred all evidence of the past may be to deny that past. To keep all evidence of the past may be to deny the future.
What do you have at home?
mmurray@irish-times.ie
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview.