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For all of us, not only hoarders, objects become infused with meaning, some with the past they allow us to keep present, to keep from having to mourn, and some with the future they might prepare us for—which not only has the fantasied talismanic power of bringing that future into being, but sometimes also a fantasy of reversing trauma. Trauma occurs when one is emotionally overloaded by an external event for which he or she is unprepared. There's the fantasy that if you're always prepared, you'll never be traumatized, no one will pull the rug out from under you because you're standing on ten rugs and you know it, because you put them there yourself.
When we hold onto objects we are holding onto memories, dreams, potentialities, moments of connection, power, success, possibility that we control—a shadow world of sorts, like a dream world with life's residue that comes to stand in for emotions we are able to both hold onto and keep at bay. In the same way that Freud, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, understood the process of joke work by applying to it his theory for interpreting dreams, one might approach hoard work through the lens of dream work as well. The task of the dream is to keep the dreamer asleep—in order for the dream not to become disturbing and wake him, according to Freud, images get split—the latent content, the powerful emotion that stirs us, detaches from the manifest content, the neutral container for the emotion, which then makes its way into the dream as seemingly meaningless content that neither rouses the dream censor nor the dreamer.
Perhaps the task of hoarding is to protect another kind of sleep.
In Gulliver's Travels, the narrator encounters characters who want to abolish words and, since all words are names for things, they carry the objects they might need in conversation in sacks on their backs. The problem, for the wise and learned, the sage, for those who need many things to discuss what's on their minds, is that they sink u