The Steal (23 page)

In November 2008, NASP filed a lawsuit against Shulman over his use of “Shoplifters Anonymous,” the phrase Peter Berlin had trademarked twenty years earlier. According to the lawsuit brief, Shulman, “an admitted recovering shoplifter himself,” had been drawing on NASP’s materials without crediting the organization. NASP was suing Shulman for false advertising and trademark infringement.

Initially, Shulman tried to fight, writing in his newsletter, “I am increasingly aware of the opportunities this ‘inconvenient event’ may be offering me, not the least of which is to stand up for myself as well as to ask for ‘divine guidance and support.’ ” And, “while I’m certain the organization suing me feels equally righteous in their position that I am, in essence, ‘stealing’ from them, I continue to choose to see the world as a big place where there is enough room for many different voices and contributors. Nobody has a monopoly on the term ‘shoplifters anonymous,’ or, at least in my mind, nobody should.” Soon after his lawyer advised him to “limit discussion” of the matter, he was still convinced that he was going to win. In the fall, he remained optimistic. “Likely, we will be filing and arguing our Motion for Summary Judgment to have this case dismissed so that anonymous self-help groups for those interested in recovery from shoplifting/theft behavior might continue to exist and expand without fear of being sued.” Later in the year, Shulman signed over the rights to the domain ShopliftersAnonymous .com to NASP.

No matter how preposterous it sounds, shoplifters do lose consciousness while stealing, said Dr. Eda Gorbis, the director of the Westwood Institute for Anxiety Disorders, Inc., in Beverly Hills and a faculty member at the UCLA School of Medicine. Gorbis specializes in treating illnesses whose sufferers go into trances for relief—eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and kleptomania. She and the handful of other research scientists who study the emotions of kleptomaniacs believe that, as with other risky activities, a dopamine and/or serotonin disorder is indicated. When the kleptomaniac shoplifts, dopamine focuses her brain’s attention on a particular object, like a scarf or a saltshaker. If her dopamine system works, she can resist the urge to shoplift. If not, in order to flood the brain with good feelings, she will want to grab something. Gorbis talked about the grabby moment in mythical terms, comparing it with the one when Diana, the goddess of the hunt, out for a moonlit chase, sees the stag. “You choose a target and run,” she said, drawing back one arm as though she were about to shoot an arrow from a bow.

Gorbis described two categories of kleptomaniacs—those who shoplift because of impulse control disorder and those driven by obsessive-compulsive disorder. Obsessive-compulsive disorder starts with anxiety, which shoplifting can assuage, whereas impulse control disorder cannot be assuaged. But kleptomaniacs shoplifting out of either kind of disorder are suffering, she said. They are not merely criminals.

The University of Minnesota’s Jon Grant, a prolific scientist studying impulse control disorders, has made it one of his life’s projects (gambling addiction is another) to convince others that shoplifting is a pathology. In 2001, after he used neuroimagery to compare kleptomaniacs’ brain waves with those of cocaine addicts, he found that the addicts’ brain activity more resembled each other than that of nonaddicts: “Consistent with the hypo-frontality of addictions, cocaine dependent subjects have demonstrated compromised white matter microstructure in inferior frontal regions. Similar white matter microstructural findings have been demonstrated in individuals with kleptomania,” he wrote. But the point of the study was not just to demonstrate that shoplifting resembles substance addictions; it was, Grant said, to prove “there’s actually a patho-physiology as to why some people can’t control [shoplifting].”

Grant is as fascinated by the trances kleptomaniacs endure as he is in their brain matter. In 2004, he studied chronic shoplifters displaying trancelike symptoms and “altered state[s] of consciousness” in the store. Shoplifters scored “slightly higher than . . . groups of patients with social phobia, alcohol use disorders, or anxiety disorders.” But some of the recent conclusions seem as much advocacy as science: A 2005 study found that kleptomaniacs “would report poor quality of life,” as if Grant felt it necessary to prove that his subjects suffered.

One reason Grant and other researchers belabor this point may be the
DSM
—the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
. Published in 1968, the second edition excluded kleptomania. Twelve years later, the
DSM III
grouped the disease under the category of “Impulse Control Disorder not elsewhere classified,” but defined kleptomania narrowly, cautioning that if the patient shoplifted for personal use or out of anger, she was probably a common thief. Ditto if she planned to shoplift. Resurrecting the nineteenth-century anxiety about confusing shoplifting the crime with shoplifting the disease, the
DSM III
warned physicians to be careful of impostors. When the
DSM III-R
, a revision, was published in 1987, it delivered the first estimate of the number of kleptomaniacs at “less than 5 percent of arrested shoplifters.” Yet the revision also widened the definition to include the shoplifter who planned her crime and the shoplifter who worked with others.

Striving to make sense of the
DSM
definitions, some researchers protested. “Stealing is an almost universal developmental behavior,” wrote Marcus Goldman, a psychiatrist who once specialized in kleptomania and thought that the disease was underrepresented. Others argued that because modern people could buy products that nineteenth-century people lacked access to or could not conceive of, a new way of thinking about kleptomania was necessary.

Today, if you call shoplifting “kleptomania,” no health care plan in America will reimburse you for treating it. If you use the word to defend your client in court, no jury will declare her innocent. A psychoanalyst I spoke to speculated that the psychiatrists on the relevant
DSM III
committee may have defined kleptomania as an impulse control disorder because they realized that that is how they could most easily get insurance companies to cover it. Doctors who treat kleptomania (whatever they call it) with means besides pharmaceuticals tend to use cognitive behavioral therapy, which, with lists and exercises, concentrates on the moment as opposed to what happened during the first years of your life. It is easier to hope that a neurochemical zap or a list will stop shoplifting than to talk about the Oedipal lack. “Psychopharmacology is big now and everyone wants to get into it,” says Eric Hollander, a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Hollander studies how kleptomania fits into the larger category of compulsive behavior. Freudian ideas are less relevant than the possibility that shoplifting may be one symptom of a compulsive disorder. He has identified a link between impulse control disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorders. On a 2005 broadcast of the science program
The Infinite Mind
, devoted to shoplifting, he explained:

Charlene Alderfer, a family therapist based in New Jersey, said, “From my experience, a secret [such as shoplifting] can keep a family in balance. It’s positive for the family system, but negative for morality. My theory is that people who feel excluded in one way or another are the most likely to steal. From a family systems perspective, I don’t think it’s useful to talk about stealing in ways that pathologize it. I would not prescribe drugs, except in some instances where people are severely depressed. I’m not knocking a biomedical approach but to treat it as part of OCD is ridiculous.”

Asked whether shoplifting is an addiction, Dr. Steven Grant, a member of the Clinical Neuroscience Branch, Division of Clinical Neuroscience and Behavioral Research, at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said, “We can learn a lot by looking at the ways addictions are similar to behaviors and we can learn a lot by looking at the ways they are different. But we don’t know if any of these things happening in the brain are causes of addiction, consequences of addiction, or predisposing factors for addiction. We are on a shifting terrain.”

I wanted to find someone who could anchor shoplifting in the modern world without reducing it to an addiction or measuring it biochemically. That is why I finally visited Adam Phillips in London. Phillips is a psychoanalyst and author of many brilliant aphoristic books on topics like flirting, kissing, tickling, boredom, Houdini, sanity, and monogamy. He sees the bad characters in literature as more interesting than the good ones. He regards psychoanalysis as “a set of stories about how we can nourish ourselves to keep faith with our belief in nourishment, our desire for desire.” He evokes rather than cures. “Psychoanalysis, of course, does not reveal what people are really like, because we are not really like anything; psychoanalytic treatment is productive of selves, not simply disclosing selves that have been there all the time waiting to be discovered, like Troy or Atlantis,” he observes in his book on Houdini.

Phillips is also heir to a group of British psychoanalysts who are part of the object-relations school, and whose most illustrious member, child psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott, is known for his interest in how infants, having been failed by their parents (the “objects”), retreat into a world of fantasy.

When I knocked on the door of Phillips’s office, an apartment on the third floor of a walk-up in the chic London neighborhood of Notting Hill, in 2006, the analyst, who has been said to resemble Bob Dylan, ushered me down a hallway to a bright and sunny front room filled with books, paintings, and photographs. A legal pad with some notes in ink lay on the floor next to the bookshelf nearest me. Phillips retreated to a yellow armchair by the window at the front of the room.

I asked Phillips whether he thought the word “kleptomania” was outdated. He said:

Phillips named three works he thought I should read: one by Melanie Klein, the radical Freudian psychoanalyst, about “children wanting to steal unborn babies”; one of Anna Freud’s most famous essays, the 1953 “About Losing and Being Lost”; and Christopher Bollas’s book
The Shadow of the Object
. Freud first explained losing, Phillips said, as a desire to tame an infantile intention into a rational act. When we lose a beloved item, it is not because our attention wavers, but because the unconscious mind overpowers the conscious one. Stealing might arise out of similar crossed circuits, Phillips said, warming to his subject.

Anna Freud’s “About Losing and Being Lost” explains that kleptomania might begin when the child, trying to retrieve the mother’s love, steals the first object from her purse. Since stealing objects, like any other concrete means of protest, cannot compensate for bad mothering, the crime blossoms. Believing that the Oedipal complex starts as early as the womb, Melanie Klein connected infantile loss and stealing by describing how children wanted to tear their siblings from their parents’ wombs to metaphorically destroy the parents. As for Bollas, he wrote, “A man who burgles may be violating a home to steal the internal objects of a family, and in that moment his act may mirror his own experiences as a child, compulsively reversing his life pattern through violent redress.”

The second-generation Freudians described an unpleasant psychic landscape emerging in one’s infancy, continuing with the dour circumstances of one’s childhood, and resulting in sometimes criminal acts—such as shoplifting—because one failed to bond with a mother.

But there is also a cultural dimension. Phillips shifted in his chair and slyly inverted ideas about shopping and shoplifting. “Shopping is legitimated stealing,” he quipped, dismissing the phrase “theft addiction” as “a violent narrowing of behavior.”

I mentioned a shoplifter who stole only LEGOs. What might that mean? Did his mother forbid him from playing with the toy as a child, so in some neo-Dickensian scenario, he was now avenging himself?

Phillips cautioned, “When the object stolen makes perfect sense, you have to wonder if the story is too seamless. It is not just about shoplifting socks because you were forced to go shoeless as a child.”

I went downstairs. I walked through Notting Hill, first passing high hedges and tiny boutiques crammed inside Victorian houses. And then I found myself on Portobello Road. Stalls shaded by turquoise awnings sold new white linen shirts and silky skirts, necklaces embossed with greenish Roman coins, linoleum blocks of antique wallpaper patterns. Hot cross buns, fruits, vegetables. Antique furniture, flowery scarves, smoky sunglasses, Murano glass perfume bottles, eighteenth-century fountain pens, canes, and Victorian silverware. One shop was devoted entirely to mechanical corkscrews. It was a kleptomaniac’s paradise. Imagine the stories the things could tell.