Can't Just Stop

by Sharon Begley

  Freud called obsessive, compulsive illnesses Zwangsneurose, echoing the coinage of Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who referred to irresistible thoughts as Zwangsvorstellung. In England Zwang, whose English translation is usually forced, was instead translated as “obsession,” but in the United States it was translated as “compulsion.” Obsessive-compulsive disorder emerged as the compromise solution. In other words, although psychiatrists and researchers today take pains to emphasize the dual nature of the illness—obsessive thoughts that trigger anxiety that can be relieved only by executing a compulsive action—its earliest investigators saw it as a single entity.

  Dead Souls and Other Hoarders

  Freud theorized that there existed an “anal triad” consisting of the personality traits parsimony, orderliness, and obstinacy. He posited that children’s realization that they are powerless (against their parents) was a traumatic awakening that some deal with by hoarding, gaining control of possessions—many, many possessions. The notion of an anal, retaining personality (born of psychoanalysts’ fascination with the nether regions of the human body and, in this case, the idea that children hold back bowel movements for byzantine reasons only a Freudian could love) became the basis for the diagnostic criteria for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder in DSM-III. Hoarding was one of nine diagnostic criteria for the disorder.

  That marked a significant break from how society had long viewed hoarding. Literary accounts of compulsive hoarding portray it as quirky or eccentric, and perhaps as a character flaw, but definitely not as evidence of madness. In Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel Dead Souls, the wealthy landowner Plyushkin has in his workshop “all kinds of wood and never-used wares,” Gogol wrote, wooden items “nailed, turned, joined, and plaited: barrels, halved barrels, tubs, tar buckets, flagons with and without spouts, stoups, baskets, hampers in which village women kept their skeins of flax and other junk, panniers of thin bent aspen, corbeils of plaited birchbark . . .” The hoard was so overwhelming that “never in all his life could [it] have been used even on two such estates,” but “to him it still seemed too little.”

  Compelled to accumulate ever more, Plyushkin would daily walk the streets of his village, peering “under bridges and stiles” for, to his hoarding eye, treasures. The local muzhiks—peasants—called him “the fisherman” for this habit of trawling the neighborhood for “an old shoe sole, a woman’s rag, an iron nail, a potsherd.” After Plyushkin’s daily rounds “there was no need to sweep the streets,” Gogol wrote, for if a passing officer had lost a spur it “would immediately be dispatched to the famous pile”; if a woman forgot her bucket at the town well he would carry it off. Gogol ascribed this to greed compounded by Plyushkin’s wife dying and his children leaving, usually in a way that disappointed him (marrying an army officer, becoming a gambler). Soon after the publication of Dead Souls, “Plyushkin” became slang in Russian for a person who hoards discarded, useless objects, and Russian psychiatry adopted the term “Plyushkin syndrome” for hoarding disorder.

  Cultural recognition of hoarding spanned Europe. In Charles Dickens’s 1853 Bleak House, whose narrative core is an interminable case in England’s Chancery Court, Krook is a rag and bottle merchant and paper collector as well as the landlord of a boardinghouse where two other characters live. “In one part of the window was a picture of a red paper mill, at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sack of old rags,” Dickens wrote. “In another, was the inscription BONES BOUGHT. In another, KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT. In another, WASTE PAPER BOUGHT. In another, LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WARDROBES BOUGHT. Everything seemed to be bought, and nothing to be sold there. In all parts of the windows, were quantities of dirty bottles: blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles.”

  Ironically, the illiterate Krook obsessively hoards papers: “It’s a monomania with him, to think he is possessed of documents,” Dickens wrote. “He has been going to learn to read them this last quarter of a century, I should judge, from what he tells me.” It was a shrewd observation, that hoarders refuse to part with their possessions out of “just in case” delusion—that a seemingly useless item might one day prove useful. Dickens might have been making a sly comment on the futility of arguing a hoarder out of that belief when he sprang on the reader the fact that, amongst Krook’s towering stacks of documents, were papers that could have resolved the endless case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.

  Like Krook, Sherlock Holmes had a “horror of destroying documents,” Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in the 1893 story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual,” “especially those which were connected with his past cases, and yet it was only once in every year or two that he would muster energy to docket and arrange them . . . Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, and which could not be put away save by their owner.” (Admittedly, that sounds like the offices of half of academia, at least in the days before computers and thumb drives.) Conan Doyle similarly held on to vast quantities of notebooks, diaries, press clippings, and correspondence, according to biographer John Dickson Carr, and they accumulated throughout Windlesham Manor, his home in the Sussex countryside.

  William James argued that acquiring possessions is a human instinct but did not consider whether that instinct can hypertrophy. So psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900–1980) jumped in: hoarding, he proposed in his 1947 book Man for Himself, is one of four types of “nonproductive orientation” a person can have.III The hoarding orientation, Fromm argued, is marked by an inability to form human attachments and a tendency to displace the drive for attachment onto objects, with the result that the hoarder withdraws socially. It is also characterized by a desire to surround oneself “by a protective wall,” Fromm wrote, with the primary aim “to bring as much as possible into this fortified position and to let as little as possible out of it.” Hoarding is also driven by miserliness, he contended, not only toward money and material things but also “to feelings and thoughts.” To “the hoarding person,” he argued, “love is essentially a possession. They do not give love but try to get it by possessing the ‘beloved.’ ”

  The hoarding orientation, according to Fromm, thrived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In that era, tradesmen and shopkeepers and other members of the emerging middle class were “conservative, less interested in ruthless acquisition than in methodical economic pursuits, based on . . . the preservation of what had been acquired,” he wrote in Man for Himself. To such people “property was a symbol of his self and its protection a supreme value.” They had a feeling “of belonging, self-confidence, and pride.” In other words, what we today take as mental disorders were, Fromm argued, common attributes of large swaths of society.

  Fromm’s description of hoarders fell well short of later understanding in several ways. He claimed that hoarders “have little faith in anything new they might get from the outside world”; with their focus on hoarding and saving, “spending is felt to be a threat.” He was even more off the mark with his contention that hoarders have characteristic facial expressions such as a “tight-lipped mouth” and gestures “characteristic of their withdrawn attitude.” Fromm described hoarders’ “pedantic orderliness” and “compulsive cleanliness,” which would come as a surprise to anyone treating hoarders today.

  Ousting Freud

  The only real competition to Freudian interpretations of compulsive behaviors came from Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926), the psychiatrist who named compulsive buying. Kraepelin did not see every odd behavior as the result of unresolved child sexual fantasies. Instead, he argued, many compulsive behaviors are, like phobias, driven by fear—not too different from the contemporary idea that they are born of anxiety. Some patients with “compulsive fears,” he argued, are “tormented by the idea that . . . they themselves are soiled or poisoned by contact with others” (more evidenc
e that the washing compulsion has persisted for centuries). Others with compulsive behaviors, he wrote, are driven by anxiety that “in tearing up any scrap of paper they might have destroyed valuable papers” (shades of hoarders who cannot part with scraps of paper from, say, 1979). Others avoid books “as a source of contagion,” or “wipe dishes frequently” and “inspect every bit of food” for contaminants, or are beset by the “uncertainty as to whether they have closed a door, or have sealed a letter that they have mailed.” Now we are getting into the territory of modern compulsions.

  Kraepelin emphasized that compulsive behaviors are driven by an urge that feels external to the mind. They “do not arise from normal antecedent consciousness of motive and desire,” he wrote in his 1907 book Clinical Psychiatry, “but seem to the patient to be forced upon him by a will which is not his own.” Executing the compulsion, Kraepelin asserted, brings a feeling of relief—an idea that still prevails in the idea that compulsions bring relief from intolerable anxiety.

  Curiously, the compulsions Kraepelin included are so common it’s problematic to call them expressions of a mental disorder. For instance, he argued, some people are compelled to remember a name, and if they cannot “think of it all day long, lying awake nights trying to recall it, and the tension cannot be relieved until it comes to them.” Others “feel compelled” to “dwell on figures,” perhaps by counting “compulsively the guests about the table, the number of forks, knives, and glasses.” Others are compelled to continually ask, “Who is God?” “Where did he come from?” and “How was the universe created?” Kraepelin acknowledged that “incidents of this sort occur even in normal individuals”—a harbinger of the recognition that mild compulsions are quite common, and while they pale beside the torment caused by extreme ones, they, too, spring from anxiety.

  * * *

  I. The quote is from the Reverend Alban Butler’s 1815 book The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints.

  II. As excerpted in the 1982 book A Mad People’s History of Madness, edited by Dale Peterson.

  III. The others are “receptive,” in which you wait for things to happen to you; “exploitative,” in which you aggressively take what you want; and “marketing,” in which you see yourself as a commodity whose worth is whatever you can sell yourself for.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Compulsive Hoarding

  LOOKING BACK ON IT ALL, Bonnie Grabowski thinks the problem began when her husband, Glenn, brought home empty cardboard boxes from work. Large, small, and in between, they were nothing special, just containers for storing odds and ends—magazines she hadn’t gotten around to reading, newspaper clippings about enchanted places she hoped to visit one day, her children’s toys, fancy dishes she used only for special occasions. But for all their mundaneness, the boxes acquired significance over the decades, something she was able to articulate only years later.

  It wasn’t an easy marriage. Bonnie had four sons and a daughter, as well as seven miscarriages, including a little girl one Christmas Day. Glenn, her college sweetheart, had served with the marines in Vietnam during the 1970s, and suffered terrifying flashbacks for years afterward. His nightmares were filled with Vietcong snipers firing on his platoon from invisible hideouts, hidden mines exploding as he walked narrow paths through the jungle, and enemies in black pajamas leaping from the fetid underbrush to plunge knives into his buddies. Bonnie could tell when something like this was playing in Glenn’s sleeping brain; he would flail around until he found her beside him . . . and then try to strangle her.

  Bonnie and Glenn lived on the east side of Cleveland, near where she grew up. By the time her children were in elementary school, she was trapped in a marriage that brought her little joy and many bruises. “I remember thinking, I don’t want to live anymore,” she told me. She felt she had no one to turn to, and so threw herself into her children’s activities. “I set aside my own things,” she said. “I thought, some day I’ll read that book. And some day I’ll get back to knitting.”

  And so the boxes filled up. Skeins of yarn and needles and books were only the beginning. Bonnie stored materials to make tablecloths and children’s clothes and supplies to reupholster furniture. She collected crepe paper and cardboard and construction paper and wood scraps for the Little League parade floats she made, and everything her boys needed to become Eagle Scouts (camping stoves and tents, wooden poles, hatchets, scores of individual merit-badge books, and more). The boxes filled up seemingly overnight, but Glenn brought home more, and somehow they filled up, too. And they kept coming.

  The little three-bedroom, one-bath house—the living room measures ten-by-ten, the kitchen eight-by-ten—has no closet on the first floor, and only one in the bedroom the four boys shared. Bonnie and Glenn had no dressers to speak of; it was an expense they avoided. Bonnie, despite being “a neat freak” as a child, kept the family’s clothes in piles on chairs or in Glenn’s ever-growing hoard of boxes. “But I still had it under control,” she said.

  When the children grew up and left home, however, Bonnie became more and more anxious, feeling that her life was “winding down.” Glenn lost jobs and got new ones, and when he was working Bonnie stocked up on toilet paper and peanut butter and other nonperishables, just in case. At first it fit in her cupboards, but then “things just piled up,” she said, the wonderment clear in her voice, as if she wasn’t sure how it all spiraled so disastrously out of control.

  It wasn’t just groceries. “I love information, so I’d stack up newspapers for a week,” Bonnie said, “and once a pile was there it just seemed easier to keep piling things on.” Mail and other papers filled bags and more bags, as she couldn’t face deciding what was important and what could be tossed, “and pretty soon the next day’s were on top of yesterday’s, and it got worse and worse.” And every day Glenn would bring home two or three more boxes. “He never gave me anything else,” Bonnie told me. “These were his presents. That’s why I saved them.” Glenn suffered a fatal stroke in 2012.

  And one day she looked up, and realized her house was veined with goat paths—narrow openings through shoulder-high piles of stuff.

  Behind the front door, ten huge plastic bags filled with mail teetered precariously; much of it had arrived after Glenn died, and she didn’t have the strength to deal with it. More plastic bags rose from floor to ceiling in the kitchen and hallways, filled with dishes for Boy Scout events, magazine clippings, books, small appliances, umbrellas . . . she wasn’t entirely sure. Boxes of clothing and books and toys in the bedrooms made it nearly impossible to enter; Bonnie couldn’t sleep in her bed, so completely had the clothes taken over.

  But she couldn’t part with the kids’ old clothes; they could be hand-me-downs for a less fortunate family. Going through the bags and piles of papers seemed as daunting as Hercules tackling the Augean stables, but the thought of tossing things unseen and unsorted triggered a heart-thumping anxiety: articles about her youngest son’s stint with the marines in Iraq, and her mother’s death notice from the local paper, were in there. Somewhere.

  She couldn’t get rid of the kids’ toys, especially the tubs and tubs containing her youngest son’s Legos; he had made such wonderful castles out of them. Nor could she part with the wooden train sets, or the extra toasters, or microwave ovens. “We were brought up not to waste,” Bonnie said. “I’m not a shopaholic; I never liked going to the store. This is all stuff we needed once, and we just accumulated it over the years. When I look at the kids’ old clothing now it brings up good memories. I don’t know what it is, just this attachment I feel.”

  Like many hoarders, any joy Bonnie feels about her possessions comes from keeping them and seeing them around her, not in using them. By keeping the stuff in the eternal realm of near-infinite possibility and rose-colored memory, she never has to confront the reality that some old appliance is of little use, that the newspaper article is not life-transforming, that she will never make another Boy Scout float. Hoarding is all about potent
ial, about keeping actualities at bay.

  As we spoke, Bonnie surveyed the piles around her and suddenly realized something else. Many of the boxes stacked to the ceiling were empty. She couldn’t bring herself to haul them to the curb on trash day despite city authorities threatening to condemn the house. “They were the only things my husband ever brought me,” she told me in a soft voice.

  I pleaded with her to find some way to clear out enough of the stuff to satisfy the building inspector. She waved her hands toward the newspaper and magazine clippings about health and gardening and vacation spots, and pictures of beautiful rooms and window treatments, all sorted by topic in labeled boxes. “My problem, I think, is that I dreamed about things,” Bonnie finally said. “I had a dream that our life would be nice, that we’d go on vacation, or I’d have a beautiful garden, or a pretty room like in magazines. But my husband never made a lot of money, and it didn’t work out. Instead of having the things I dreamed about, or going on the vacation, I became attached to the pieces of paper. Now all I have is the paper.”

  * * *

  There is no question that hoarding shares key features with collecting, just as mild compulsions are shadows of severe OCD. Surely there is an echo of Bonnie’s explanation of why she can’t rid her home of reminders of happier times in how retired Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz described his feelings when, in 2016, he sold a collection of Judaica that he had been amassing for nearly half a century. “It breaks my heart to have to sell it,” he explained. “I want to feel that I’m connected to the past.”