A Freudian story

A short story which was started by my being pointed at the story in the May issue of Scientific American at reference 1, and which was completed (at least in so far as I was concerned) by branching out to references 2 and 3.

If, as an infant, I have problems with my relationship with my mother, perhaps because she abandons me or is unreliable, I am likely to have problems with relationships – attachments in the jargon of this story – in the future. I quote from reference 1: ‘a classic American study in 1987 … found that 56 percent of us have a secure attachment style, about 20 percent are anxious and about 24 percent are avoidant’. I am also likely to have problems with my self-esteem.

By way of compensation, I am likely to become more attached to objects, to possessions. Things which I have better control over.

Another sort of compensation is winning, perhaps winning games, winning which is good for my self-esteem and by extension good for my relationships. And so, when I am winning, I am less bothered about those objects. I quote again: ‘M.B.A. students who had fewer job offers or worse grades than their peers were likelier to display such symbols of business success as expensive suits and fancy watches’.

In any event, as I become less attached to my mother, I am apt to transfer some of that attachment to a transitional object, often a soft toy or something of the sort. Perhaps just a special rag. Such transitional objects are very important to me during the transition.

This attachment to objects may flower, later in life, into full blown hoarding.
Along the way, it seems that I would regard my possessions as an extension of myself and become rather wary about letting them out of my sight, never mind out of my possession.

At the same time, I would believe that the possessions of others were extensions of those others, were imbued with something of those others. So the possessions of someone bad would be bad, would be tainted. Such beliefs are pervasive and can easily be demonstrated by experiment (some of which involve our treasured mobile phones).

A tainting which can be removed, or at least mitigated, by washing, ritual or otherwise. So much for us highly developed and sophisticated people of the west not being superstitious.

But we may have the excuse that hoarding food was a evolutionarily sound strategy. As was washing our hands before meals.

From all of which we can also deduce – or at least confirm – that people who collect Nazi memorabilia are apt to be rather unpleasant. And that baptism has a good pedigree.

PS: I believe that this sort of DIY psychology is popular in the US. Whereas here we are apt to emphasise the dangers of a little knowledge and prefer to put our trust in experts.

References

Reference 1: Why We Become So Attached to Our Belongings: Low emotional security can intensify our relationships to our belongings – Francine Russo – 2018. Available online but not open access.

Reference 2: Toys Are Me: Children's Extension of Self to Objects -  Gil Diesendruck, Reut Perez – 2015.

Reference 3: The role of attachment style and anthropomorphism in predicting hoarding behaviours in a non-clinical sample - Nick Neave, Hannah Tyson, Lynn McInnes, Colin Hamilton – 2016.

Reference 4: http://www.yourparentstoo.com/about-francine/. From where I have taken the illustration. Note the ‘buy’ button, bottom right – with all of this being very important to people who want to sell us things!

Reference 5: Cast Away – Tom Hanks – 2000. A cinema story about getting attached to an object in the absence of anything better.