A man fills his house from top to bottom with tools, used furniture, and wood.
Fifty-five-year-old Nicholas lived with his wife and daughter in a small two-bedroom house in a rural area. He had been injured in the machine shop where he worked and was now in retirement. He was a master craftsman and could build almost anything. The problem was that he never finished anything he started so the house would fill up with half-finished tables and chairs, bureaus, and materials of various other unfinished projects.
In addition, he was a collector and hoarder. He would collect pieces of wood, stray lumber of any kind, tools, and broken-down furniture. When the materials would begin to threaten all the space of the house, his wife would throw out whatever she felt was truly unnecessary junk. Of course, this man would become furious whenever she did this. His answer would be to redouble his efforts and quickly replenish his treasure.
Eventually, his wife couldn’t keep up with it and, soon, not a single surface in the house was clear. At a certain point neither his wife nor his daughter could stop it and the entire house began to fill up. Then it was not possible to walk through the house without clearing a path.
His daughter was not able to invite any friends to the house, and eventually, when this man refused to seek help, his wife and daughter finally left. By the time they had decided to leave, he had already completed the second layer of materials that were stacked and piled onto the first layer. The clutter was world-class—chairs on tables on top of more broken furniture, and so on, up toward the ceiling.
This was an example of a psychotic picture—what’s known as a mental breakdown or simply as craziness. It was, in the language of symptoms, an accelerated compulsive need to collect, ultimately for the purpose of hoarding. And what this hoarding really amounted to was a house full of junk.
“It always felt good,” Nicholas explained. He meant that even as a child, he felt good saving things. He reported that when he was very young, he also never finished anything he started; he was always called a procrastinator by his parents and his teachers. He reported that as long as he could remember, his tension could always be cured when he found something he could collect. Thus, it seems that his compulsive symptom of collecting was lifelong, or what is known as a chronic problem.
In this sense of his chronic problem, Nicholas’s collecting became a personality inclination, or it took on the cast of a personality trait, quite early on in his life. Therefore, the symptom became familiar, like a personality trait and no longer merely an alien aspect of his personality, as a symptom would usually be. The early picture of his childhood was also one in which his room was in a steady chaotic state. It was full of clutter and there was not much his parents could do about it.
This man was one of three children; he was twelve years younger than the youngest of his two sisters. He claimed that he was undersupervised by his parents who, by the time he came along, apparently were quite tired. His sisters were busy with their own social lives and he had very little memory of them from his childhood. His memory of his mother was of a controlling woman who only wanted things her own way. He said he thought his father was weak, and overall, his memory of his father was vague.
Almost never completing any of his assignments, he eventually dropped out of high school in his senior year. He remembers being almost always anxious about something or other and he admitted to feeling inferior to others his age all through his growing-up years.
Associated with his later serious compulsive hoarding, and his obsessional sense of ruminating about it all the time, was what he did near the end of his senior year of high school before he dropped out. This something was terribly revealing about his personality and what it meant about his problem. He reported that he always wanted to know things, but because he never did his homework, he felt he never learned anything. He meant that he felt he literally didn’t really learn a thing in high school. Not a thing! Yet he wanted to know things and actually yearned to be able to do his work. But he was hopelessly unable to organize himself and so everything was always scattered about him and, even more important, he was scattered within himself. Obviously, he had some aspect of an attention deficit disorder that is consistent with the inability to organize oneself and characteristic of scatteredness. He said he couldn’t explain any of it to his parents even though he wanted to, because he felt he wouldn’t know where to start or how to explain it. He also felt that they were not that available and actually too busy for this kind of analysis. Thus he always felt at loose ends about things and could never even get his homework assignments completely down on paper so as to know what to do even if, perchance, he would have been able to do it.
So what did Nicholas do? He began spiriting home objects from his chemistry lab class. Apparently, he really had a need to feel he knew how things worked—how mixtures of things go into making something new. The problem was he had not learned a thing in chemistry class and was failing. Yet, he was stealing chemicals and test tubes, as well as the racks that the tubes sat in, and spiriting them into his room at home. He kept them hidden until his mother wasn’t at home. Then he filled a test tube with various chemicals and, based upon his wish that he was, in fact, really knowledgeable about what he was doing, he heated the test tube containing the chemical mixtures over the stove in the kitchen. On the first try, the chemicals erupted and shot out of the tube, hitting the wall. This result, stemming from not knowing something that he pretended to know, ended his short career in chemistry.
The entire drama of Nicholas’s wish to be a scientist who knew what he was doing was based upon his extremely impoverished knowledge base, for which he created a fantasy springboard—at least for a moment or two—thus enabling him to feel knowledgeable. Of course, it didn’t work and the test tubes and rack joined the other junk in his room and remained as part of his growing collection of debris. He didn’t throw any of it out and all of it became more material to hoard.
We know that Nicholas treated his tension and anxiety by collecting and hoarding. In fact, he stated that the more he hoarded the more solid he felt. It is tempting to guess that because he felt so unfinished in his family, he mirrored this feeling by leaving everything he did similarly unfinished. He indicated that when he was a child, it seemed to him that no one ever talked to him. His answer for all of it was: “I think I always wanted to fix something.”
It may be, with respect to what it all meant—meaning his collecting and hoarding—that Nicholas, underneath it all, always wanted to fix his situation, that is, fix his family. Even more basic, he may have wanted to fix himself and felt it was necessary to take things into his own hands, because no one was giving him any attention. Therefore, it is assumed that he was very angry at the condition of his isolation and also that he felt it was hopeless to depend on others.
His fixing wish motivated him to collect and hoard tools and wood, and the mere act of doing so was important to him because symbolically it represented a time in the future when everything would be all right and fixed. Under such a condition where everything was imagined as being already fixed, or about to be fixed, he would not have to be so angry. His symptom of collecting and hoarding always made him feel better—it lowered his tension—because it represented a repair of his fractured family situation and thereby neutralized his suppressed or repressed anger. Thus, it was never necessary to complete anything because the collecting and hoarding already satisfied his wish—that is to say, his psychological aim was never really to build anything in the first place; rather, it was all symbolic. To actually fix something or to complete the making of a piece of furniture, for example, was only a focus on the reality of the object—the piece of furniture. However, his was not an issue of reality because the materials for making the furniture only served psychological and emotional wishes, and were not at all based upon really making a chair or table.
No, Nicholas had bigger plans than making a chair. He was collecting and hoarding as a way of repeatedly assuring himself that his family was, in fact, already fixed and complete, and also that he himself was fixed and complete. Thus, his direct wish of having everything fixed related to his feeling less tense when he actually played out his symptom of collecting and hoarding.
Furthermore, it is very important to note that his hoarding was a replacement and symbol of knowledge—of knowing things. As long as he hoarded, it meant that the family was fixed and that he was fixed, primarily because it also meant knowledge. That was the basic symbol of the hoarding—knowledge—the feeling that he, indeed, did know something!
So, the collecting and hoarding concerned his unconscious wish to be fixed, and to be fixed also meant that he had knowledge—that he did learn something despite the fact that in high school he was absolutely sure he had not learned anything.
But it was his unconscious anger that connected the symptom of collecting and hoarding to the wish to be fixed. It was his anger about his situation that, as a child, he couldn’t face and the force of which he most likely dared not know about. In this sense, it may be that a great amount of anger was suppressed or repressed and the nature of the anger may have been overwhelming—especially since his symptom developed when he was very young and didn’t have the emotional resources to deal with his frustration—perhaps especially with his possible sense of abandonment; that is to say, that he felt no one in the family had time for him.
It would be a case where this sort of anger threatens the life of the psyche because the sense of neglect and emotional abandonment became so entrenched and so etched that his isolation was the fuel that kept generating his anger because it so represented everything that he hated about his life.
Because of this, hypothetically, Nicholas’s symptom was ejected from his psyche and began to migrate toward the realm of personality traits. This kind of anger would have a magnitude that covers the psyche, an intensity that pulverizes it, a power of penetrating deeply into the psyche, and the force to sustain itself over time—duration—even over a lifetime.
This was definitely a case where the use of medication would be necessary to enable a successful application of the symptom code so that the compulsive hoarding could be reconstituted into its original tension—namely, Nicholas’s sense that he was broken and that he felt he was undereducated. In this, its raw form unfurled from the hoarding symptom, he would be able to talk about his inadequacy concerns without having to act them out in the form of a symbolic hoarding symptom.