Explanation of Hoarding

We live in a time when owning something is important. From early childhood on, we become aware of the fact that possessions often separate us from others. It may be more toys than our friends. It may be our family lives in a bigger or better house, or has more cars, or we have more clothes. However, as these articles point out, there is a vast difference between possessing something for which we worked or which was given to us, and possessiveness, which is identified as on obsessive compulsive disorder. Even the ordinary "normal" human being cannot escape reading or hearing about someone's possessions, whether it is Fortune's survey of the world's richest men, or Architectural Forum showing off the mansions and homes of "important" people. However, "(T)he meaning of possessions and the role they play in our lives has received very little attention in the psychological literature in recent years (Frost & Gross 1992 367). What we need to investigate, therefore, is the fine line between wanting and having possessions and a somewhat unnatural desire to hoard- that is, to have possessions we may not actually want or need merely to have them. This is possessiveness at its most extreme, referred to as "hoarding".