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The psychology of collecting

Where do I get to write about the Psychology of Collecting? I have no degree in any of the behavioral sciences. (I took Psychological Foundations of Education for my teaching credential a few years ago. I got an ‘A’, but frankly, I thought it was all a bit silly.) The answer is simple. I have made a hobby of watching people’s hobbies. Talk to them -or more accurately- listen to them talk about a topic they love. (And I have to say, there are worse ways to learn about something. An interesting speech and a boring speech are often separated by little more than the speech and your interest in that topic.)

Collecting could be thought of as a subset of a broader human behavior called, if only for convenience, hobbies. But I’m not sure this is true. My theory is that collectors and hobbyists are completely different things. Take the model train people as evidence. I used to take my casework to train shows when they came to Northern California. The nice people, the model, train the ‘amateurs’, but they come in two different flavors. There are those who build roads and small cities and mountains, etc. and then play with their trains. Then there are the collectors who are somehow forced to own a sample of every locomotive Lionel made in any given year. Or every Lionel locomotive ever made. Or all locomotives, cars, tankers, cabooses, etc. of a certain scale/year/manufacturer. Often they don’t even open the package, which lowers the value, they told me. Both builders and collectors go to the same show and – I suppose – talk to each other – but they are completely different species.

PATHOLOGICAL COLLECTORS:

There are some poor souls who are pathological in their collection. Not my word, ‘pathological’. Researchers use this word to describe collecting to the point that it interferes with daily life. Their houses are full, and I mean literally every square foot-from-floor-to-ceiling-full-until-it-crashes-through-the-floor-below-FULL of stuff. These people usually have no interest in the things in their collection, but they do get upset if someone gets tired of removing them. There is some research indicating how this might be explained. Steven W. Anderson, a neurologist, and colleagues at the University of Iowa studied 63 people with brain damage from stroke, surgery, or encephalitis who had no prior problems with hoarding before their illness, but then began to fill their houses with things like old newspapers, broken appliances, or boxes of junk. The good doctor says:

All of these compulsive gatherers had suffered damage to the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in decision-making, information processing and behavioral organization. People whose picking behavior remained normal also had brain damage, but instead it was distributed across the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

Anderson posits that the drive to gather stems from the need to store supplies such as food, a drive so basic that it originates in the subcortical and limbic portions of the brain. Humans need the prefrontal cortex, he says, to determine what “supplies” are worth stockpiling.

I need to make one last point before moving on to simply crazy, non-pathological collectors. All the reading I’ve done suggests that collecting for whatever reason and to whatever degree is poorly understood and there really isn’t much clear research out there. This brings me back to my starting point: I claim to be an expert in the psychology of collecting because there is no one else who is better qualified than me.

NUT-CASE COLLECTORS (non-clinical):

Something less ‘traumatic’ / ‘dramatic’? – and it’s pretty clear I’m on thin ice psychological talk here – it’s just the obsessive-compulsive disorder collectors. There is no detectable brain damage, just good old OCD, or we could call it OCCD (Obsessive Compulsive Collecting Disorder). But I wonder how many people who are truly committed to a given subject (coin collecting, the Denver Broncos, UFOs, conspiracy theories, you name it) have family and friends look at them, shake their heads, and mutter something about OCD? under their breaths. But before moving on to collectors: collectors with a capital C, coins, stamps, model railway carriage collectors, etc., we might consider the collector in all of us. There is a delightful story written by Judith Katz-Schwartz – Remembering Grandma. Her grandmother was a refugee -at a very young age- from Tsarist Russia who collected….and I quote…

…the tips of Bic pens neatly wrapped with elastic bands; hundreds of tiny clothespins strung on safety pins; at least a hundred glass jars, all sparkling clean; eighty-seven Ace bandages neatly rolled and fastened.

I thought this was kind of funny, until the guy I share a woodshop with reminded me of the two large garbage bags I’ve filled with carefully cleaned BBQ sauce bottles. I love BBQ sauce and eat it on almost everything. About a bottle a week. I have no idea what will come out of them, but I KNOW the day will come when I will be glad I have all these empty BBQ sauce bottles.

Judith sums it up beautifully and with a kind and rare insight, I think. In the aforementioned article, she closes with…

Some people collect for investment. Some collect for pleasure. Some people do it to learn about history. And some people “save things” because it helps fill a void, calm fears, erase insecurity. For them, collecting provides order in their lives and a bulwark against the chaos and terror of an uncertain world. It serves as a protector against the destruction of everything they have ever loved. Grandma’s things made her feel safe. Although the outside world was a dangerous and ever-changing place, she could still sit safely in her apartment at night, “gathering my things.”

Then there was an episode of the TV sitcom Third Rock from the Sun. You may remember that Dick (John Lithgow) became obsessed with Fuzzy Buddies. I consider “Fuzzy Buddies” to be the producer’s way of avoiding being sued by the people who make “Beanie Babies.” If one were perfectly honest about things, I suspect that most if not all of us saw a bit of ourselves in the character.

There is another rather unique kind of wacko collecting: the kind practiced by dictators while hoarding trinkets. Possible motives for collecting abound: compulsion, competition, exhibitionism, the desire for immortality, and the need for expert approval. According to Peter York, a British journalist who studied the decor of dictators for his book Dictator Style, he recognizes all of the above in his models. It’s basically a dictator’s job, he says, to take everything over. For example…

Saddam Hussein

Sci-fi fantasy paintings with menacing dragons and scantily clad blondes.

adolf hitler

Bavarian furniture from the 18th century. Antique dealers in Munich were ordered to keep an eye on it.

Kim Jong II

20,000 videos (Daffy Duck cartoons, Star Wars, Liz Taylor and Sean Connery movies)

Idi Amin

Various race cars and lots of old film reels from reruns of I Love Lucy and Tom and Jerry cartoons.

joseph stalin

Westerns with Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and John Wayne. Stalin also inherited the films of Joseph Goebbels.

He also notes that “some of these people,” he says, “were really very short.”

VICTIMS COLLECTORS:

I don’t know what to call this set. There are some companies that sell things so well, and with such a terrifying vision for their customers, and do so with such deliberate and carefully designed marketing plans to exploit the peccadilloes of poor collectors, that these collectors are victims of something, themselves. , or the petty. old marketing companies, I don’t know which ones.

A good example is Hallmark cards and their keepsake Christmas decorations. Note particularly the word “memory” and compare it with the idea of ​​”nostalgia.” (Any research on collecting by doctors seems to hinge on the word “nostalgia”.) It is reasonable to collect things that speak of the past. This is neither more nor less than any historical museum. It is also reasonable to collect things that trigger -hopefully- pleasant memories of our own past. (People my age remember Chutes and Ladders and Candy-Land. This is the sort of thing Daniel Arnett writes about in his Why We Collect article, posted elsewhere on this site.) But these things are authentic.

Hallmark has made millions – and I have nothing against making money – selling fake nostalgia – and let’s not go short of words – to women. If you were to read the articles I have, it also seems clear that these women are not women with careers, education, children to raise, or, and we’re still not beating around the bush, much else to do.

And how far will Hallmark go to get these poor women to buy the next ornament, or a series of 5 or 10 ornaments? Seminars, conventions, newsletters, autograph opportunities (the artists), and preview performances. (Advance views of plastic decorations removed by the millions ??? YES!)

Not just Hallmark either. Consider the Franklin Mint, Hummel Figurines, small pottery from English country houses, commemorative plaques with Elvis painted on them. Not in vain are these things ‘nostalgic’. Every time a kids movie comes out, McDonald’s or Burger King have little plastic toys/figurines/antenna balls of each character. Then children of a certain age must be fed Happy Meals until they have the entire collection. (For kids, the “nostalgia” goes back to the movie they saw a week ago.)

ACCIDENTAL COLLECTORS:

My sister tells me about a fourth and final category of collector. This guy could also be seen as a victim, but I chose to call them accidental. She writes…

Someone mentions once that they like X and then for years all their friends give them is X and then they really start to hate X. Loren and Bonnie [my nieces] I once had a teacher that everyone in the whole school knew loved giraffes and collected them. He was talking to her one day and he told me that it all started years ago when he was explaining a project the kids had to do to tell themselves. She set herself as an example and said out of the blue that she liked giraffes. Now this poor woman has received every possible giraffe ever made. She told me that she doesn’t even like fucking animals.

The psychology of these poor souls is easy to understand. They are the ‘codependent’ nexus (‘accidental enablers’?) of mild massive OCD. They know he means well, but they’re too nice to say anything to get out of it. What are you going to do?

Judith has some great wealth or advice to offer collectors. And some very nice own things for sale. Visit her Twin Brooks site and her book Secrets of a Collecting Diva. If I had had her book before writing some of my articles, I would have saved myself a lot of time researching and inventing things.