T raditional psychoanalytic practices are all about narrative, translating psychological distress into the realm of storytelling. Narration within the analytic space allows patients to transform inchoate emotional experiences into coherent form, a sequence that creates meaning. Language adds weight to memory otherwise bound to the prelinguistic realm of dreams or memories. In other words, formulation into verbal narrative facilitates psychic integration.
In “Psychoanalysis as Therapy and Storytelling,” Antonino Ferro suggests that psychoanalysis is a form of literature. The narratives constructed between analyst and patient are a medium to access deeper truths, which is healing. Owning and organizing possessions can be seen as a rare opportunity to have total control over those narratives.
While hoarding and collecting may look like cousins—each involving the accumulation of objects—the psychoanalytic stories they tell are fundamentally different. Hoarders often feel uncomfortable about revealing the degree of their compulsion and the state of their homes. On the other hand, collecting is an ego-syntonic activity: the collector feels at one with their act of collecting.
Artist, co-founder of the iconic Paper magazine and self-proclaimed “cultural anthropologist,” Kim Hastreiter reigns over an eclectic collection, ranging from ceramic babies to Tauba Auerbach paintings. Her recent memoir, “Stuff: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos” (Damiani), paints an audacious narrative of her life through the objects she keeps in her Manhattan apartment. She talked us through what it’s like to live with every object she has collected—instead of arranging and rearranging them in a public space, museum or storage. Her desire to collect stems from a place quite different from that of a museum curator or an investor with a personal art advisor. The things she buys are reanimated by their relationship to her home, not necessarily to each other. The destination, therefore, becomes the organizing principle of selection.

Courtesy of Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, CT, USA.
“My collection tells the history of my life,” she says. From a young age, Hastreiter’s life has been all about collecting—both art and people. She invests emotion, memory and at times her entire essence into her objects, breathing meaning, import and context. She anoints the things she collects with the status of “just right.” While her approach to collecting could be thought of as unsystematic, without any particular order —she eschews seriality or repetition and detests anything that comes in a complete set, which categorically devalues an art object—she says she would “never put an artist up that [I] thought would hate the artist next to it.”
We paused to wonder with Hastreiter whether she saw her collecting as a hoarder’s compulsion. “There are certain things I didn’t buy, and I obsess for years,” she told us. For both collector and hoarder, holding onto objects that recall memories or sensations ensures that these memories or sensations never fade. One could say that while hoarders cannot be selective about the things they keep, collectors have to be excellent editors. A good narrative, after all, needs a good editor.
When Hastreiter falls for an object, she must have it. Yet, she can also conclude that an acquisition was “wrong.” She speaks frequently and eloquently about her capacity for editing, including knowing how to get rid of things. “Put me in a room with a thousand photographs, I’ll find the best one in five minutes,” she says. “Editing is one of my skills. I never even went to school for it, but over the years I realized I have certain skills that I’m really good at, and certain things I’m really bad at. I can go to the biggest thrift store on earth and I’ll find the Hermès scarf in, like, 10 seconds. I know what’s mediocre and what’s fabulous.”
“While hoarding and collecting may look like cousins—each involving the accumulation of objects—the psychoanalytic stories they tell are fundamentally different.”
On the other hand, hoarding is defined as a chronic inability to discard possessions. Typically, hoarders struggle with a compulsive urge to save items from being thrown away, passed on or sold. For the hoarder, as for the collector, a deep psychological worry can develop at the thought of letting objects go. Each item bears its own psychological weight and functions as an emotional stand-in, an objectified nostalgia. For the hoarder, homes become labyrinths of clutter. The clutter becomes a fortress against psychic emptiness, tangible proof that their inner world won’t disintegrate. Freud associated hoarding with the anal stage of development, suggesting a symbolic attachment to control, order and retention.
Collectors invest meaning in their chosen objects that help construct identity, narrative and even legacy. Think of Freud himself, who surrounded his consulting room with a curated array of Etruscan artifacts and Greek figurines—arguably a personal museum that reflected and stabilized his intellectual and cultural identity. Collecting, in this view, is a symbolic and often future-oriented act. The collector is not just acquiring but organizing, narrating, mastering. It is an expression of desire, not compulsion; agency, not anxiety. Hoarding, by contrast, is marked by disorganization, distress and a collapsing of symbolic meaning. In hoarding, objects cease to be symbolic representations; they become defensive shields against loss, abandonment and psychic fragmentation. Where collecting externalizes meaning, hoarding internalizes fear.