Stuff (8 page)

Quite a different theory of collecting relates to how people evaluate their self-worth. The compensation theory suggests that people who question their self-worth need evidence to reassure themselves of their value and importance. Physical objects provide clear and tangible verification of mastery over the world. The feedback boosts the collector's self-esteem and contributes to a positive self-image. William Randolph Hearst, founder of the Hearst publishing empire (and the model for the title character in the movie
Citizen Kane),
accumulated a vast collection of tapestries, paintings, sculptures, furniture, coins, and much more. He used some of the items to furnish his palatial home, but the majority filled warehouses throughout the country. Perhaps his collecting provided him with much-needed evidence of his mastery over the world. (Many of these collections are now on display at the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California.)

Some collectors show extreme behaviors that straddle the border between eccentricity and pathology. Andy Warhol, an artist, filmmaker, photographer, and celebrity, is credited with the development of pop art, a movement in which art reflected the popular culture of the time. Warhol's paintings of brand-name products such as Campbell's soup and Coca-Cola were re-creations of the culture, ways of preserving not the exceptional but the mundane. He was also an avid collector and spent part of every day shopping at flea markets, antique stores, auction houses, and galleries—anywhere he might find something of interest. He collected not only fine art of every style and period but also what many considered junk. Like other famous collectors, Warhol displayed little of what he bought and tucked most of it away in warehouses. Still, his five-story house in New York City was so crammed that he could live in only two of the rooms. According to Stuart Pivar, a frequent shopping companion, Warhol had a plan to sell at least part of his collection, but he was still in the acquiring phase of this plan when he died at age fifty-eight. Whether he would ever have gotten past this phase is questionable. He once gave an antique shop a Mexican ceremonial mask to sell but then retrieved it out of fear that it would in fact be sold.

One of the most unusual aspects of Warhol's collecting became apparent shortly before his death. During the 1970s and 1980s, Warhol preserved nearly every bit of ephemera that came into his possession. He kept a cardboard box beside his desk, and when the impulse struck him, he cleared everything off his desk and into the box, no exceptions. Valuable prints, cash, and apple cores all went into what he described as his "time capsule." He dated it and stored it along with more than six hundred others. About one hundred of his time capsules have been opened so far. There seems no discrimination regarding what went into each one—an electric bill, silverware from a trip on an airplane, telephone messages, large sums of cash; whatever was in his life at that moment was swept into the box. Warhol's time capsules have become a pop culture archaeologist's dream. They are a record of Warhol's life in all its detail and triviality—as perfect a record as could be had. Material from the time capsules has been displayed in museums around the world. In this way, Warhol has become immortal.

Warhol was not the first to collect such seemingly unrelated objects in one container. Common in Europe during the sixteenth century were "cabinets of curiosities," or German
Wunderkammers
—jumbled collections of strange, wonderful, rare, and curious objects designed to create a picture, if not a wholly representative one, of the world at the time. Cabinets of curiosities were the precursors of early museums, filled with whatever the collector found interesting. Warhol certainly followed in this tradition, but he found
everything
interesting. His definition of art was all-encompassing, from the Jasper Johns painting he found at a flea market to the plastic trinket he bought at the same time. For Warhol, even the process of collecting seemed to be a form of art. Judging by the interest generated by his time capsules, many share this view.

Is such a passion for collecting pathological? It hardly matters how much stuff anyone owns as long as it doesn't interfere with his or her health or happiness or that of others. But when it does, the result can be dramatic, as was the case with the Collyer brothers and with Irene. Distress or impairment constitutes the boundary between normal collecting and hoarding. Many of the people we see experience great distress because of their hoarding. Acquiring and saving things has wrecked them financially and socially, driven their families away, and impaired their ability to carry out basic activities of living. In some cases, neighbors' and family members' lives have been impaired as well. Hoarding is not defined by the number of possessions, but by how the acquisition and management of those possessions affects their owner. When hoarding causes distress or impairs one's ability to perform basic functions, it has crossed the line into pathology.

Defining hoarding this way means that people with smaller living spaces and those without the resources to rent storage space may be at greater risk for developing a hoarding problem. In our experience, however, people with hoarding problems fill the space they are living in regardless of the size or number of storage units they have. We have seen clients who own four or five houses. When they fill one house, they move to another and fill it in short order. Then they move on to the next one. The more space they have available, the more space they fill. Perhaps this is actually the goal—to fill space.

The edges of hoarding are not always clear. Excessive clutter is the hallmark of hoarding and the feature most likely to cause distress and interference. But definitions of what constitutes clutter vary widely. We once received a referral from a psychiatrist shortly after he read a newspaper story about our research. He was treating someone with a severe hoarding problem and thought the man would be a good candidate for our research. When the patient called us, he complained that his hoarding was so bad that his wife had left him. We braced ourselves when we approached his house, but when we got inside, it was as neat as a pin except for two piles—one under the dining room table and one behind a chair in the living room. We assumed that he had miraculously cleared his home, but he said that this was as bad as it had ever been. He complained bitterly about the clutter, insisting that it had resulted in his wife's departure. Apparently, he had convinced his psychiatrist, who had never been to his home, that hoarding was his problem. It was clear to us that he had no hoarding problem, but rather needed an explanation for why his wife had left. After a few minutes with him, it became apparent that his temper, rigidity, and controlling behavior were more likely explanations for his wife's departure. Clearly, his understanding of the word "clutter" differed from ours, a common occurrence when we talk with people about what we study.

To make sure we had an accurate way to assess clutter, we set out to develop a nonverbal measure that did not rely on the word. We tried photographing my lab filled with stuff, but it just didn't look right. Piles of newspapers, clothes, boxes, bags, and other things I had brought from home looked out of place in the laboratory. I asked the students in my senior seminar if they would help. As a class project and with money from Gail's university, we rented a college-owned apartment and set about filling it with stuff. We planned to take pictures of each room at various levels of clutter. The students enjoyed filling the apartment with newspapers, magazines, clothes, and things otherwise destined for the dumpster.

We got permission to borrow couches and chairs from the psychology department lounge to furnish the apartment. Unfortunately, word of that permission did not reach campus security. The class met in the evening, and after class one night, we removed the lounge furniture and put it on top of my car. It was nearly midnight by the time we got it to the apartment and unloaded. When I got home, my telephone was ringing. It was a campus security officer informing me that security had had a report that my students had stolen furniture out of the psychology lounge. I explained that I had orchestrated the removal, not my students, and that we had permission from the department chair. He did not accept my explanation, nor did he see the humor in the situation. He informed me that I would have to return the furniture immediately, or he would file charges against me and the students. One of the benefits of working at a small college is that you get to know most of the people working there. Campus security reported to the director of facilities, who happened to be a friend of mine. Luckily, he had a sense of humor when I called him at 1:00
A.M.
and explained my problem. He made a phone call, and we didn't get arrested.

We focused on three rooms—the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom. Our plan was to fill each room nearly to the ceiling and take photographs as we uncluttered the space. To make the job easier, we started with several layers of empty copy paper boxes. On top of these we put the stuff accumulated by the students. As we removed the boxes, the top layer remained roughly the same for each photo. This allowed us to create a series of photographs from Collyer-like to clutter-free for each room. We ran into a problem trying to remove boxes from the room, so we "buried" a student in the midst of the clutter near the back of the room. When we were ready to set up the next picture, she popped up and took out some of the boxes from underneath the clutter. I wondered whether her parents would have thought her tuition was well spent on a class in which the professor buried her under a mountain of clutter.

The result of the project was a series of nine photographs depicting clutter in each room. People can simply point to the picture that looks most like their bedroom, living room, or kitchen, and we don't have to rely on their interpretation of the word "clutter." We use the "Clutter Image Rating," as we now call it, in most of our ongoing research. It gives us an unambiguous marker of the seriousness of the problem and clarifies the word "clutter" in the world of hoarding.

Hoarding has a distinguished literary history. Literature from as far back as the fourteenth century makes reference to hoarding. Dante reserved the fourth circle of hell for "hoarders" and "wasters" in his
Inferno.
Charles Dickens created several hoarders, including Krook, a
Bleak House
(1852–1853) character whom Dickens described as "possessed of documents" in a shop where "everything seemed to be bought and nothing to be sold." Honoré de Balzac's
Cousin Pons
(1847), a collector of "bric-a-brac," was thought to be loosely based on Balzac himself. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was described by his accomplice Watson as having "a horror of destroying documents," to the extent that "every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript." The Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol described a classic hoarding case in
Dead Souls,
written in 1842. Plyushkin was a wealthy landowner whose peasants took to calling him "the fisherman" for his habit of "fishing" the neighborhood for "an old sole, a bit of a peasant woman's rag, an iron nail, a piece of broken earthenware," all of which he piled into his already packed manor. Since
Dead Souls,
the word "Plyushkin" has been used in Russian slang to describe someone who collects discarded, useless, or broken objects. In Russian psychiatry, the Plyushkin syndrome is a disorder in which someone collects and saves useless objects, usually trash.

Hoarding is not just a Western phenomenon. In 2005, the
Mainichi Shimbun,
an English-language newspaper in Japan, ran a story describing a fifty-six-year-old man whose apartment floor collapsed from the weight of twenty years' worth of magazines and newspapers. The term for such cases in Japan is
Gomi yashiki,
or "garbage houses," the subject of research by Fabio Gygi, a British anthropologist. Hoarding has been reported throughout the world on every continent but Antarctica. Although its severity may vary and the nature of the items hoarded may be different in Egypt than in China, the behavior of excessive collecting and storing of objects does not appear to be an exclusively culture-bound syndrome.

Tag sales. That's my thing. It's what gives me joy. I get a real high from finding a bargain. Every Saturday morning, I'm supposed to work, but I go tag-saling instead. They dock my pay, but I don't care. This is what I love to do. I'm in a much better mood when I get to work.

—Irene

If she hadn't gotten onto the highway, it might not have happened. If she had turned north instead of south, things might have been different. But she went south, a direction that took her past the entrance to the mall. The Target billboard hooked her. Before she had time to think about it, she was in the parking lot and out of the car. At this point, it didn't matter which way she turned. Shopping cues surrounded her, and favorite stores stretched out in all directions. The pleasure of buying—of acquiring stuff—was at her fingertips, and she was powerless to resist.

Janet came to us not long after that binge. Her home was seriously cluttered, but more problematic for her was her excessive buying. Although she had a successful professional career with a good income, her family was always short of money. Her credit cards were maxed out, and she owed more than $25,000. She had tried but failed to pay off any of the debt in three years. In fact, the total was growing rather than shrinking.

Her financial problems were the source of serious arguments with her husband. The week before she came in for treatment, her husband had criticized her for her spending and refused to help her with cooking or cleaning at home. She was angry and upset. She felt unappreciated by him and complained that he had made her "slave of the year." Depressed about her circumstances and anxious to avoid further conflict with him, she got into the car to go for a drive.

Her drive led her to the mall, and before she knew it, she was standing in a clothing store, still brooding over the fight at home. Even at this point, however, a shopping episode was not inevitable. She had not yet thought much about what she was doing. When she did, however, her thoughts betrayed her. Her first thought was not of shopping, but of her husband:
What right does he have to tell me how to spend my money? I work hard and make a good salary. I deserve nice things!
These thoughts wiped away any chance she had of resisting the urge to buy. Despite the fact that she understood the seriousness of her addiction to shopping, the thoughts made it seem to her that she had a
duty
to shop just to prove her worth. The combination of her emotional state and the rack of dresses in front of her strengthened her rationalizations, and they in turn kept her from thinking rationally about her plight.