The psychology of collecting: love, anxiety or desire

A lot of people collect something: About a third of people in the UK collect something. These could be all kinds of things such as photographs of a person’s vacation, souvenirs of trips, pictures of one’s children, kids’ report cards or simply junk. Their reasons why they have collected things vary hugely.

The evolution of collecting

During the 1700s and 1800s there were aristocratic collectors, who roamed the world in search of fossils, shells, zoological specimens, works of art and books. The collected artefacts were then kept in special rooms called ‘cabinets of curiosities’ for safekeeping and private viewing. A ‘cabinet’ was, in part, a symbolic display of the collector’s power and wealth. It was these collectors who established the first museums in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in America.

It seems that while growing up we all collected something we made into a hobby. It could have begun with baseball cards, marbles or stamps. Then it moved on to antique books, money or clocks and unusual things.

Speaking of the unusual, do you know the words for the people who collect things? An archtophilist collects teddy bears, a deltiologist collects postcards, a numismatist collects coins, a vecturist collects metro tokens, and a clock collector is called a horologist.

The motivations to collect

Why do we collect things? Some people collect for investment, yet one must wonder how a penny can become worth thousands of dollars. Some collect for pure enjoyment – it’s fun. Some collect to expand their social lives, attending swap meets and exchanging information with like-minded souls.

Medical scientists and anthropologists collected human remains for the purpose of study.

For some, the satisfaction comes from experimenting with arranging, rearranging and classifying parts of a big world out there, which can serve as a means of control to elicit a comfort zone in one’s life, e.g. calming fears, erasing insecurity. However, many motives can combine to create a collector – one does not eat just because of hunger.

Collecting vs hoarding

Sigmund Freud postulated that collecting ties back to the time of toilet training. Freud suggested that the collector is trying to gain back not only control but possessions that were lost so many years ago. Well, that’s Freud.

One psychoanalytical explanation for collecting is that unloved children learn to seek comfort in accumulating belongings; another is that collecting is motivated by existential anxieties – the collection, an extension of our identity, lives on, even though we do not. More recently, evolutionary theorists suggested that a collection was a way for a man to attract potential mates by signalling his ability to accumulate resources.

While Freud may clearly have overstated the issue, his explanation shows the dark side of collecting, the psychopathological form described as hoarding, collecting and keeping large amounts of food, money, etc., especially secretly. Some theorists suggest that the behaviour associated with hoarding can be an extreme variation on compulsive buying. Some experts have described hoarding as ‘repetitive acquisition syndrome’.

 

Adapted from the National Psychologist and Guardian websites