Collector’s Couch: Why do we form emotional attachments to our collections?

T he figure of the collector carries a certain mystique, existing somewhere between a cultivator of taste—well-versed in what qualifies as “good art”—and an eccentric. Yet the act of collecting, whether of blue-chip or everyday objects, is surprisingly ubiquitous. Many of us over the years have built some form of collection: dolls, stamps, seashells, watches, maps, records, snow globes, cars, clothes, postcards, buttons. Writer Vladimir Nabokov was a connoisseur of butterflies. Musician Neil Young collects model trains. Artist Damien Hirst’s acts of collecting are at the core of his practice. Sociologist Jean Baudrillard wrote that, in collecting, “the everyday prose of objects is transformed into poetry, into a triumphant unconscious discourse.”

Collections are frequently measured by their refinement, cultural capital and cogent worldview. But what is the psychological function of collecting itself? In broad strokes, collecting can be seen as a form of self-expression, a way of constructing one’s identity, piece by piece—this yes and this no, this is me and this is not me.

Yet it is not always clear where the wish to gather, accumulate and possess comes from: Anxiety or desire? Nostalgia or mania? Conservatism or creativity? Mastery or surrender? Obsession or passion? Contemporary French collector François Pinault once said that in collecting, “Je ne regrette jamais. [I never regret.] I have no sense of nostalgia. Tomorrow is what interests me.”

Is the collector following an unconscious need to build some illusion of logic out of the chaos of lived experience, the shadows of past trauma? Or is collecting a declaration of having reached a judicious conclusion about world order?

Our minds have an extraordinary capacity to imbue the world around us with meaning we generate from within. American writer and critic Susan Sontag once argued that, “To collect is to rescue things, valuable things, from neglect, from oblivion, or simply from the ignoble destiny of being in someone else’s collection rather than one’s own.” It is a way to recover and reanimate objects, breathing new life into them with the collector’s personal idiom.

German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, himself an avid collector of books, claimed that for “a true collector the acquisition of an [object] is its rebirth.” By transfiguring their newly possessed objects, collectors embed themselves within their collections, laying claim not only in life, but after death as well. Boston arts patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, a bona fide arbiter of 19th- and early 20th-century taste, amassed artworks not only to share her appreciation for art and signal her elevated social status, but to immortalize her carefully constructed image, leaving clear instructions in her will not to alter the content or display of her collection after her death.

In contrast to understanding collecting as a generative project à la Benjamin, one can see it as fulfilling a desperate wish to repeat and make predictable. Collecting thus becomes an act of preservation, on the spectrum with other rigid or compulsive inclinations that often reveal a need to hold on to and control each and every bit of slippery memory. In other cases, as Benjamin aptly observed, collectors erect “a dam against the spring tide of memories [that] surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions.”

Collecting can also be a symptom of a compulsion to enact experiences that have been disavowed, repressed or not fully processed—in the case of unmetabolized grief, holding on to any scrap of the lost loved one as if they had not left or died. From this perspective, rather than a creative act, collecting is a reaction to the underlying dread of failure or loss, including of one’s body, for example, castration anxiety or the death drive.

As these different interpretations show, collecting is a practice torn between the clinical concepts of conservancy and conversion (either as displacement or substitution), between antiquity and modernity. The collector is always grappling not just with larger questions of value and history, but also with personal issues of identity, memory and experience. Being a social practice, collecting deserves closer analysis as a symptom of our relationships not just with possessions but also with material culture as a whole.