Tidy House, Tidy Mind? Nonhuman Agency in the Hoarding Situation

Potts, Tracey

Abstract

This article aims to disturb the received wisdom ‘tidy house, tidy mind’ by tracing its emergence and consolidation: from psychoanalysis to clinical psychology through to philosophy and reality television. The contention here is that the commanding presence of the mirror as a clinical apparatus serves to eclipse a full consideration of the hoarding situation as one involving not only mental health professionals and clients, that is, ‘hoarders’, but also the materials of the heap – as the ‘hoard’ is read straightforwardly as a reflection of the hoarder’s mind. It is argued, further, that the conspicuous neglect of things, that is, material objects, in the modelling of the hoarding ‘problem’ – the aetiology of Hoarding Disorder is cast in entirely human terms – serves to frame ‘hoarders’ as individually culpable. By extending the forensic logic of both clinical and popular psychology, it is argued that such framing amounts to securing forced confessions, where hoarders are left to bear total responsibility for a situation, which is, ultimately, a question of distributed agency between human and non-human entities.

Citation

Potts, T. (2015). Tidy House, Tidy Mind? Nonhuman Agency in the Hoarding Situation. Subjectivity, 8(2), https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.1

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 6, 2015
• Publication Date: May 28, 2015
• Deposit Date: Jul 8, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 4, 2019
• Print ISSN: 1755-6341
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 8
• Issue: 2
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.1
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1113587
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/sub.2015.1
• Additional Information: This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Subjectivity. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Potts, T. Subjectivity (2015) 8: 102 10.1057/sub.2015.1 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.1