Why Do We Collect?
Posted on 12. Dec, 2021 by Paul Sochaczewski in Ganesha and Collecting
This article is one of a series, available here, that has been adapted from Searching for Ganesha: Collecting Images of the Sweet-Loving, Elephant-Headed Hindu Deity Everybody Admires. Available in paperback and ebook from Amazon.
ISBN: Print: 978-2-940573-37-0
E-Book: 978-2-940573-38-7
Why Do We Collect?
Deep Psychological Need or Harmless Pastime?
by
Paul Spencer Sochaczewski
www.sochaczewski.com
Barbie dolls. Porcelain chickens. Medieval armor. Stamps. Toothpaste tubes. Fossils. Butterflies.
What is behind this widespread need to collect? Does quantity matter? What do the psychoanalysts say – harmless pastime or dangerous obsession?
I was a semi-nerdy kid growing up in northern New Jersey. Like many youngsters, I suppose, I collected stuff – baseball cards, rocks, and North American arrowheads. (As an adult I run across many men of my Baby Boom generation who collected these artefacts. Were there really so many arrowheads floating around in 1950’s suburbia?)
My primary interest, though, was Roman coins. My favorite is a dupondius of Augustus and Agrippa celebrating the military victory against the combined forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE. This coin, which cost me my modest weekly allowance, set the stage for Gaius Octavius to become the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus. The reverse shows a crocodile chained to a palm tree (pretty obvious Egyptian symbolism) with the legend col nem, indicating that it was minted in Nemausus (now Nimes, in southern France). I like to hold such coins and wonder what stories they could tell from 2,000 years ago.
I now collect statues, amulets, and images of Ganesha, the Hindu sweet-loving elephant-headed god who removes obstacles and supports writers.
I don’t worship Ganesha. I’m fascinated by him, how he was created by Hindu marketing experts and retro-fitted into the pantheon, and why he has become one of the world’s favorite deities.
But behind my modest collection of some 150 Ganesha-related pieces lies the nagging question. Why? After all, I have just one mountain bike. One toaster. One garden hose. Surely one Ganesha should be enough?
In my new book, Searching for Ganesha, I include an illustration showing the evolution of stuff. Everyone has stuff. Some of it is basic and essential to provide shelter, food, transport, and clothing. But stuff has a tendency to expand. Essential stuff can too easily branch off into too-much stuff, which becomes clutter. The stuff might then grow a metaphorical tree limb and become an obsession, leading to hoarding. Or, in turn, the stuff might acquire emotional value and become a collection.
Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychoanalysis, was what I call a “magpie” collector. His consultation room in London is filled with some 3,000 varied antiquities, including a fifth-century BCE sphinx, a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, African tribal sculptures, and plenty of phalluses (make of that what you will). Pride of place went to a bronze of the goddess Athena, the female deity of wisdom, which he said protected him during his self-exile from Vienna.
Freud suggested that a chronic gatherer and organizer is locked in an anal-retentive mode, unwilling to let go, unable to touch his emotions. Writers Benjamin Poore and Harriet Agerholm described Freud’s theory: “Our sense of ourselves – the ‘I’ that we each imagine ourselves to be – is made up of all the people and things we have once cherished and then lost or abandoned. Your identify is the accumulated heap of lost love objects. Which is to say, if you were to wander around your psyche, it might look rather like a room stuffed to the gunnels with dusty old artefacts, some tarnished, and now unloved, some recently rearranged, or polished; rather, in fact, like Sigmund Freud’s study.”
Werner Muensterberger, who has been described as an ethno-psychiatrist, amassed an important collection of African masks. He wrote: “Observing collectors, one soon discovers an unrelenting need, even hunger, for acquisitions. This ongoing search is a core element of their personality. It is linked to far deeper roots … which derives from a … sense memory of deprivation and a subsequent longing for substitution, closely allied with moodiness and depressive leanings.”
Carl Jung felt that accumulations represent a collective, unconscious need to hoard “nuts and berries” once needed for survival by our early ancestors.
This psycho-babble can be tiring. Perhaps the answer is simple. Might a collection be a litmus test to determine how people react? What do you think of my collection of garden gnomes (the world record is 1,600), umbrella sleeves (730), airline sickness bags (6,200), 78-rpm records, hot sauce (6,000 different bottles), or Indian head pennies? Answer positively, and you can be my friend.
Maybe a collection a way of self-individuation, a way to say: Hey, I’m different. I’m interesting. Attention must be paid.
Can we judge the quality of a collection by size (Guinness World Record!)? Does a collection need to be catalogued and put into taxonomic categories? Do we acquire a new piece based on whether it is rare (or expensive), fashionable, or beautiful? Does each object strike an emotional chord?
Each of my Ganesha statues tells me stories. And I, in turn, can tell stories about each one. How I acquired it. The aesthetic buzz I get by a statue’s sinuous form, the intellectual zing I get when trying to unravel a panel’s iconographic subtleties. With each piece I recall the people who influenced me during my quest: Just one more Ganesha, but it’s got to be special.
The collection hasn’t taken over my life (or my house, to the relief of my wife). But it has made life more interesting and, as Ganesha should, opened a few important doors to adventures and friends.
But sometimes I wonder if collecting is a diversion, and that I should pay more attention to the wisdom of the Dalai Lama, who wrote: “People assume that happiness stems from collecting things outside of yourself, whereas true happiness stems from removing things from inside of yourself.”
Some day I will give away my Ganesha collection. But for now, my accumulation of fat, skinny, multi-armed, one-tusked, sitting, standing, reclining, and dancing Ganeshas simply gives me pleasure. That’s something Freud never mentioned.
The Evolution of Stuff, from Searching for Ganesha
Background
Paul Spencer Sochaczewski first went to Southeast Asia in 1969 with the United States Peace Corps, where he was assigned to assist rural teachers in Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. He remained in Asia for some 20 years, working in advertising and journalism, and those experiences have informed his writing on a wide variety of Asian-themed topics and quests.
He has lived and worked in some 85 countries and written 16 books and some 600 articles for publications including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BBC Wildlife, Travel and Leisure, and Reader’s Digest. His latest book, Searching for Ganesha, has been published to generous reviews. During the first week, the book has become an Amazon #1 bestseller in three categories – Asian Travel Photography, Private Museums and Collections, and Biographies in Hinduism. For more on Paul’s background please click here.