Tidy house, tidy mind? Non-human agency in the hoarding situation

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.


Introduction
Psychotherapist: 'The environment we live in is a reflection of how we feel inside.' 'Hoarder': 'It's very complicated, that one. Very complicated.' (The Hoarder Next Door, 2014) With the publication of the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) (2013a), a number of conditions categorised previously under the heading of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD) appear as discrete illnesses. Although Internet Gaming Disorder is bracketed as a Section III condition requiring further investigation before inclusion, the separate listing of Hoarding Disorder is justified on the grounds that it is 'a distinct disorder with distinct treatments' (American Psychiatric Association, 2013b, p. 1). Further, given that an estimated 'two to five per cent of the population' is held to suffer from Hoarding Disorder, the aim in isolating it as a specific condition is to offer more 'effective intervention and support for sufferers and their families ' (ibid.).
For viewers of lifestyle television and, especially, of hoarding reality shows such as Hoarding: Buried Alive  (2013), the idea of hoarding as constituting a specific condition warranting technical and therapeutic management will come as no surprise. For a number of years now (roughly since the late 1990s) the cluttered domestic interior has been construed, precisely, as a symptom, requiring professional intervention and treatment. Framed as a form of addiction necessitating diagnosis, (often 12-step) treatment and rehabilitation, individualised culprits are taken to task for their abject living conditions and, further, set straight by a specialist team usually comprised of psychologists together with professional cleaners and organisers. Audiences, meanwhile, are trained to be on the lookout for the thin-end-of-the-wedge, telltale signs that they too might yield to the temptation to hoard. This shading of pathological behaviour into everyday practice is responsible for much of the frisson of hoarding reality television; as it is encoded in the title and premise of a popular British reality series: The Hoarder Next Door (2012aDoor ( , b, 2014, and in self-help books such as The Hoarder in You: How to Live a Happier, Healthier, Uncluttered Life (Zasio, 2012), hoarding is a too-close-for-comfort phenomenon.
Central to the drama of hoarding, in both clinical and pop cultural presentations, is the idea of reflection: of the mess as an extravagant projection of the hoarder's mind, and hence of flawed mental processes (decision making, sorting and so on), or else as a result of the introjection of a traumatic event, which finds external, material expression in hoarding behaviours. The spectacular heap of things that forms the customary mis-en-scène of hoarding reality television thus serves as a magnificent, above all, visible symptom of a spectacular breakdown on the part of its owner. Either way, the hoard, together with its constituent clutter, becomes reduced to the status of a mirror throwing back a portrait of its perverse engineer.
Crucially, given its clinical classification as a behavioural addiction, Hoarding Disorder is ripe for a programme of behaviour modification (Skeggs, 2009, p. 635) and for the lessons dispensed by reality television. Questions of what and what not to wear and eat, how not to raise children and deal with pets are resolved through the imposition of strict disciplinary techniques and protocols, where desired results are dramatised and made visible during the course of the particular show. Here the mirror works to verify cure, as successful treatment is discernible in readily observable changes in behaviour. In the case of hoarding and cluttering behaviours, newly disciplined housekeeping practicesevidenced in a newly disciplined and tidy houseare read as confirmation of therapeutic triumph: the 'issues' that lie beneath the hoard are brought to the surface and are seen to evaporate with exposure to the light of day.
This article aims to challenge the analogy between domestic and psychological interiors that informs popular and clinical presentations of cluttering and hoarding behaviours. Psychologised versions of the folk wisdom 'tidy house, tidy mind' can be seen to masquerade as knowledges, as the state of the home becomes readable as a trustworthy indicator of the state of mind of its occupant, begetting new commonplaces and stock ideas: 'mess equals stress', (Making Space, 2014) for instance, or CHAOS (Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome) (Cilley and Ely, 2006, p. xviii). What is especially noteworthy in the analogous treatment of house and mind is that a degree of translationin Latour's sense of the word as 'displacement, drift, invention, mediation' (1994, p. 32)can be discerned between the clinical and cultural realms, in that the boundaries between medical and self-help advice are, at times, quite fluid, making the border between popular and professional contexts unclear. With some clinicians writing self-help guides (Frost and Steketee, 2011) and others appearing on reality shows as resident psychologists (Zasio, 2012) the traffic between clinic and culture is far from a one-way street, resulting in an often blurred presentation of diagnostic criteria in both settings. Although popular psychology can be seen to draw much of its authority from the clinic, it is equally the case that clinicians make use of popular forms, such as reality television to support their endeavour to establish a solid evidence base for the objective existence of Hoarding Disorder, which is, further, primed to be scientifically investigated with the apparatus of the DSM (see Frost and Steketee, 2014). The publication of textbooks aimed at both mental health researchers and practitioners (Bratiotis et al, 2011;Frost and Steketee, 2014) purports to respond to the straightforward need for more information on hoarding behaviours. Crucially, the event of DSM-V alongside conspicuous media interest in hoarding is said to have precipitated the demand for a dedicated volume on the subject as part of the Oxford Library of Psychology series (Frost and Steketee, 2014, p. 3), making for an intensification of the dealings between culture and clinic.
Far from validating the science of professional investigations into hoarding, however, it is the contention here that the consolidation of house/mind thinking in hoarding reality television and in clinical instruments such as the Home Environment Inventory (HEI), the Clutter Image Rating (CIR) (Bratiotis et al, 2011) which rely on an optical, pictorial measurement scaleproduces an inadequate science. The trouble with both mind and house doctorspsychologists and lifestyle gurusas they survey the houses of their case studies is that they drastically underplay the material entanglement of human with non-human life. The aetiology of Hoarding Disorder, in its clinical expression, is an entirely human affair, taking in dysfunctional and maladaptive behaviours such as excessive emotional attachment to what are seen to be inert material objects, and deficits in the ability to process information and affective disorders, expressed in an inability to form successful social relationships (Frost and Steketee, 2014, p. 4). Similarly, popular psychology, as it manifests in hoarding reality television, relies on a standard narrative of projection and/or introjection in that hoarders are required both to confess their disorder and admit to some sort of traumatic event, which is granted a causative function. Put simply, the situation of hoarding, as clinical and popular psychologists construe it, is lacking contribution from a crucial group: the members of the hoard, that is, the things themselves. The objects, things and substances that constitute the hoard are figured as little more than a sign or symptom of their host's disorder, and, as such, are spirited away.
The dominating presence of the mirror as a diagnostic tool thus serves to eclipse a full consideration of the hoarding situation as one involving not only psychoanalyst/life coach/storage guru and analysand/client/slob but also the materials of the heap. As a result, psychic reflections bounce off every surface leaving the occupant of the cluttered house caught in the glare of a therapeutic gaze, which is difficult to escape. Hoarders, it will be argued, are held solely to account for a situation that they contribute to only in part. The reduction of the complex material dimensions of living and dwelling to what Barad (2003, p. 825) terms 'representationalist logic', as the state of the home is taken to stand for that of the mind, has the effect of riding roughshod over questions of agency, not least, the agency of non-humans.
The work of providing a more object-oriented (Bogost, 2012) account of hoarding as a social and cultural phenomenon is already in progress, most notably in Bennett's (2011) expansion of her Vibrant Matter project, which involves theorising 'the call of things' and the 'the nonhuman powers of the hoard'. Bennett's (2010, p. 6) notion of 'thing-power', that is, 'the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle', issues a serious challenge to a cultural imaginary that posits fully fledged and separate human beings immersed in a world of inert objects, objects that they are obliged to segregate from or sweep aside in order to qualify as human at all. For Bennett, those labelled as hoarders have a unique contribution to make to a consideration of the manner in which 'human being and thinghood overlap' (2010, p. 31). 'Preternaturally attuned to the call of things' (2011), hoarders can potentially allow for a refinement of questions of agency as distributive and as something dispersed across divisions of human and non-human, subject and object, culture and nature. The phenomenon of hoarding, then, permits an extensive investigation, via an eccentric, sideways route, into the profound capacity of things, substances and vitalities to both attract and repel and to form assemblages with human and non-human accomplices. Above all, Bennett insists that the call of the hoard, the figurative elephant in the room, ought to be taken seriously, which means resisting judgement and meeting 'hoarders' 'not as bearers of a mental illness but as differently abled bodies that might have special sensory access to the call of things' (2011). By pulling focus and pushing things into the foreground and people into the background Bennett hopes to disarm the psychosocial dominance of explanatory frameworks around hoarding, augmenting the conversation around the co-constitutive nature of human and non-human being in the process.
To allow this conversation to flourish, however, some supplementary work is needed. Bennett's appeal to take the call of things seriously is, by her own admission, easier said than done when it comes to amplifying the voices of hoarders in relation to their heaps and assemblages. It matters little, for those snagged in the diagnostic apparatus of Hoarding Disorder, that they apprehend the power of the material world, that they appreciate the complexity of the stuffliness of life, as Bennett (2011) well knows: to imply that 'the things did it' potentially compounds what is construed, in advance, to be a pathological relationship to the objects in question. Equally, as routinely evidenced in the pronouncements of experts in the face of the 'hoard', any attempt by the 'hoarder' to articulate any defence other than that of full culpabilityand confirmation of the truth of the diagnostic frameworkis met with stubborn refusal. As it will become clear, those who try to speak up for their things are usually castigated for choosing objects over people (frogs, penguins and banana skins over a live-in boyfriend, in the case of one episode of Hoarders) (Hoarding: Buried Alive, 2011) or, otherwise, for being in a state of denial. Indeed, pictorial instruments such as the Clutter Image Rating were specifically developed to provide an allegedly objective measure as a means of overcoming the problem of denial in client assessments of their own clutter. In the words of The Hoarding Handbook: 'A discrepancy in ratings in which the clinician's ratings are substantially higher than the client's suggests low insight and limited capacity for self-motivated treatment' (Bratiotis et al, 2011, pp. 62-63).
Producing the kind of shift that Bennett and other object-oriented thinkers intend, towards a distributed sense of agency between humans and non-humans, relies on disruptingdecisively and fundamentallythe optical apparatus that secures the portrait of the hoarder's mind as visibly disordered. The subsequent work of this article will be directed, then, towards the representationalist thinking that infects the way the domestic interior is conceivedfar and beyond psychoanalytic ideasto form a recalcitrant, powerfully normative cultural logic around living and dwelling. The omnipresence of house/mind thinking can be traced in early psychoanalytic writings, through the diagnostic apparatuses of the DSM, the philosophical and literary imagination and into popular cultural forms such as detective fiction. More, analogies, homologies and reflections abound even in the work of psychoanalysts who attempt to account for artifacts and objects as more than reflections of human intentions. Both Phillips (2000) and Winnicott (2005) apprehend the messiness of things as a productive feature of everyday life and as part of a healthy, that is, good-enough psychic milieu.
Neither goes far enough, though, in his figuration of object relations and both tend to reduce the thing-world to the status of a props cupboard dedicated entirely to human drama.
What follows contrasts a Foucauldian genealogical approach with the kinds of historical presentations that dominate professional handbook literatures, which tend to offer smooth teleological accounts of the development of hoarding stretching from mediaeval times to the presentoften folding in fictional examples indiscriminately (see Penzel (2014) for a stark example) or else, on a micrological level, identifying personal history as the motivation for sentimental attachment to things (Bratiotis, et al, 2011, p. 14). Foucault's (1984, p. 87) method, on the contrary, seeks to undermine any notion of an inexorable rise of any universal behaviour, whether sexuality or madness or criminality, by emphasising a history that denaturalises rather than consolidates, that sabotages rather than buttresses scientific ambition. The certainties of the human sciences are thus reconfigured as 'organised discourse[s] or apparatus[es] for constructing and controlling human subjects' (Crowley, 2009, p. 342), allowing for a consideration of the conditions of emergence of particular discourses, instruments and knowledges in any given historical period. The kind of history that Foucault advocates directly contradicts the curiously history-less history of official accounts, which base their 'judgments on an apocalyptic objectivity … [and a] belief in eternal truth, [and] the immortality of the soul' (Foucault, 1984, p. 87). Genealogy, with its 'suprahistorical perspective' promises to deflate the dream of 'objective science' (ibid.).
This is no small matter. Given the increasing appeal to scientific truth of both clinical and popular presentations of Hoarding Disorder, especially as the apparatus becomes more reliant on neuropsychological modelling and the alibi of MRI imaging, the need to offer a more wavering, contingent, above all, nuanced portrait of hoarding is clear. This is still more pressing considering the normative judgmentoften admitted in clinical writingsinvolved in determining so-called healthy ways of dealing with the stuffliness of life (see Frost and Steketee, 2014, p. 4). The drastic underestimation of social and cultural forcesthe clamorous insistence of consumer culture is one conspicuous absence in much clinical and popular explanationtogether with the overestimation of behavioural and neurobiological models in hoarding situations produces a scene, which is only partly conclusive. Obtaining confessions from hoarders without any consideration of all of the actants involved in the situation of hoardinghumans and non-humans alikeis, then, the equivalent of gathering inadmissible evidence. Conspicuous in their absence from any enquiry, the material elements of the hoard are reduced to mere projections of disorderly minds and thus escape attention leaving their human partners to bear full responsibility for what is, in essence, an unruly assemblage. Anyone who has ever allowed the washing-up to stack up or has mislaid their keys in a random pile of stuff ought to be familiar not only with the seemingly magnetic power of mess to proliferate and but also with the energy it takes to maintain order. Or to frame things in terms of Bennett's articulation of assemblages, the agency of the assemblage is such that humans can seldom be seen to be in control of anything. She elaborates: Assemblages are not governed by any central head: no materiality or type of material has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory or impact of the group. The effects generated by an assemblage are, rather, emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to make something happen … is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality considered alone. Each member and proto-member of the assemblage has a certain vital force, but there is also an effectivity proper to the grouping as such: an agency of the assemblage. (Bennett, 2010, pp. 23-24) In short, without considering all members of the assemblage, practitioners are securing forced confessions: with hoarders being collared for crimes that they could not have committed without an accessory.
The extended metaphor of forced confession is by no means a casual turn of phrase and is appropriated explicitly from the forensic emphasis of contemporary hoarding reality television. Before moving on to provide a genealogy of house/ mind thinking, detailing its emergence in early psychoanalysis, it would be useful to pause to take in some hoarding TV in order to more fully appreciate the extent to which the house is seen to snitch on its inhabitants, establishing the domestic interior as utterly revealing of interior mental life.

Domestic Forensics
The forensic framing of domestic space can be seen in everything from the pop science of the CSI franchise to advertising campaigns for cleaning products: where toilets speak behind their owner's backs (what does your loo say about you?) to popular gameshows like Through the Keyhole, where panellists attempt to guess the identity of celebrities as they are revealed through the clues given by their homes. 1 Indeed, the prevalence of forensics in popular media has led Steenberg (2013, p. 1) to identify 'a forensic turn', where 'a mediated version of forensic science has embedded itself in American culture's foundational views about truth, criminality, professionalism and victimhood, and the contemporaneous surge in forensic entertainment' (ibid.). Although evidence for the forensic turn can be found most readily in TV crime drama, the drift of a forensic gaze is, as Steenberg observes, discernable in lifestyle media. From makeover TV to lifestyle cookbooks, forensic evidence is relied upon to support all manner of judgements and adjudications of myriad 'failed' and mismanaged lifestyles.
The case of hoarding reality TV can be seen to present its own subgenre of forensic pop psychology, where tropes drawn from police procedurals, such as evidence gathering, interrogation and laboratory work, frequently structure the narrative presentation of each particular 'case'. Indeed the presentation of each 'hoard' as a case, establishes from the outset a hermeneutic logic, offering the viewer, as with detective fiction, a puzzle to solvea mess to clear upby the end of the show. An especially camp performance of domestic forensics is viewable in the British cleaning-entertainment programme How Clean Is Your House (2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009), where 'grime-busters' or 'dirt detectives' Kim Woodburn and Aggie Mackenzie isolate 'grime-scenes' (complete with do not cross police barrier tape), collect microbial swabs for lab analysis and interrogate suspects accused of various 'filth offences'. Offenders are, then, subjected to an intervention on the part of a clean-up squad and placed under a treatment programme designed to restore domestic competency by instilling a corrective set of housekeeping practices.
The majority of de-cluttering/cleaning/hoarding shows offer a far sterner version of the genre. Aggie Mackenzie's latest television vehicle Storage Hoarders, for instance, where participants reveal the cluttered contents of their selfstorage units, advocates ruthlessness as a way of life when it comes to dealing with even the most sentimentally charged things. 2 Treated as a form of outsourced repression, with 'serial hoarders' depositing items that are too painful to deal with, although paying for the privilege, storage 'users' (the resonance with drug users is deliberate and pronounced forcefully) are taken to task for holding onto emotional baggage. One participant, for example, is said to have spent £1265 over a period of 8 months to 'keep her memories on ice' after the sudden death of her partner. The intervention of professional declutterers, called in to help sort out what is framed as a hoarding problem, is, then, justified on the grounds of lending emotional support for the moment when the unit is opened and the 'past' is revealed: 'inside this unit are the memories of a shared life … I want to be there to support her as she downsizes her box of memories'. The drama of the moment that the memory-box is 'prize [d] open … to see what the past reveals' is further heightened by close-ups of the unit's owner's reaction as she exclaims, affirming the show's diagnostic framework: 'Oh God … the memories …' The 'past' is further sorted into the show's constituent categories: skip (that is, throw away), keep, sell and charity, with the ultimate aim of 'saying goodbye' to it (not before sending what are perceived to be valuable items to auction). Here the ruthless attack on the material world is at its most evident. Not only is the conflation of stuff with the past complete: 'we see how Francois' past performs under the hammer', the dematerialisation of memory is powerfully asserted: 'downsizing doesn't mean erasing the past. Memories are kept in our hearts, not in the bottom of a storage crate'.
The Hoarder Next Door (2012a, b, 2014), similarly, presents a forensic framework, beginning with the resident psychologist sifting through the rubble of a particular hoard in search of clues to the specific trauma that will be held responsible for catalysing the participant's hoarding behaviour (the item commonly selected being a family photograph): 'we want to find out what's underneath the hoard and what's underneath you'. Regardless of the particularities of the stories that inform individual hoards, though, the narrative arcs essentially remain standard and can be traced throughout the subspecies of hoarding reality television. Each show tends to begin with crisis intervention, involving the exposure of a guilty secret: a team of experts, usually comprising psychologists, professional organisers and extreme cleaners, together with a camera crew enter the home of a subject deemed to have a hoarding problem. Some form of psychological evaluation follows, where a traumatic event is identified as the trigger of the hoarding behaviour: hoarders are construed as modern day Miss Havishams, stuck in the drama of painful events, unable to let go and move on. A treatment programme is set up, typically counselling in combination with organisational skills and household management training, as part of a rehabilitation narrative. As the hoard is viewed as manifesting traumatic memory, clearing the clutter is itself seen to be part of the treatment and so getting rid of the dusty wedding cake aspects of the hoard is framed as therapeutic. Hoarders are often encouraged to smash, shred or burn emotionally charged objects themselves or to visualise releasing their perceived toxicity as professionals remove them from the premises. All in all, the aim is to restore order and to ensure against future recidivism; to use the mock political correctness of How Clean is Your House, the 'domestically challenged' are set straight, impelled to clean up their acts and, above all, required to vow to stay clean.
The restoration of domestic order as a sign of mental health has a long history and can be traced to the emergence of psychoanalysis itself. Although the professionalised view of hoarding behaviours has tended to organise elements of this history to reinforce the veracity and truthfulness of the category of the 'hoarder' and to bolster scientific ambition (see Frost and Steketee, 2014), it is possible to push things the other way and to use history to dissolve some of the certainties of the forensic framework that secures the house and the mind as mirror images of one another.
Psychoanalysis and the Emergence of House/Mind Thinking As Phillips (2000, pp. 59-60) notes in his essay on clutter, at the heart of psychoanalysis is an impulse to tidy: 'Psychoanalytic theoryand, indeed, its highly ritualized practicehas an aversion to clutter'. In much the same way that Mrs Darling in Barrie's Peter Pan deals with the mess of her children's minds, psychoanalysis attempts to bring meaning to the analysand's mess of symptoms. In a mildly sinister passage, Barrie anticipates Freudian ideas as early as 1911: It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day …. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out the prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on. (Barrie, 2004, p. 8) In the case of psychoanalysis, though, any naughtiness or evil passion is placed less at the bottom of the mind than brought to the surface, exposed to the analyst's gaze and folded away into a meaningful diagnostic and curative pattern. Or else, mysterious, preconscious processes sort things out unawares, as with Freud's (2001a, p. 26) example of 'when someone finds, immediately after waking, that he knows the solution to a difficult mathematical or other problem with which he had been wrestling in vain the day before'. As evidenced, further, by the very notion of disorder, which operates as a codeword for pathology, the psychoanalytic project can, then, be summarised as one governed by ordering and sense-making activity.
Early psychoanalytic approaches can be seen to converge with nineteenth century anxieties around consumer behaviour as the allure of consumer goods is taken to produce new forms of addiction and obsession (Dant, 1999;Holliday and Potts, 2012). Compulsive consumption in the form of extreme book collecting, for instance, is first documentedand importantly, medicalisedin 1809 with the publication of Dr John Ferrier's The Bibliomania: An Epistle to Richard Heber, Esq (Penzel, 2014). A range of 'diseases of the will' coupled with 'addict identities'such as kleptomaniacs and alcoholicsmake their appearance as the century progresses (Sassatelli, 2007, p. 156).
Not surprisingly, psychoanalysis takes the figure of the collector as one of its prime case studies, forging a powerful linkage between collecting and hoarding in the process. Penzel (2014) outlines the history of hoarding as one involving three key analysts: Willliam James, Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, all of whom help to pathologise the practice of collecting. James' (2007) The Principles of Psychology figures obsessive collecting and hoarding as vestigial instinctual activity akin to a kind of squirrelling of resources in the anticipated event of harder times. James' relation to hoarding is more complex than Penzel's account admits though. On the one hand, such an impulse to hoard evidences James' 'mind-stuff theory' (p. 151), where the accumulation and aggregation of 'primiordial units of mind-stuff or mind-dust' (p. 146) is a key mechanism of evolutionary psychology and the development of higher forms of mentality. On the other, acquisitiveness and the desire to collect is framed as potentially pathological behaviour, that is, 'blind impulse' (p. 290). What keeps such desires in check is the presence of rational deliberation: 'Most people probably have the impulse to keep bits of useless finery, old tools, pieces of once useful apparatus, etc.; but it is normally either inhibited at Tidy house, tidy mind? the outset by reflection, or, if yielded to, the objects soon become displeasing and are thrown away' (p. 290).
The significant event in the figuration of collecting/hoarding behavior as pathology, though, comes in the form of Freud's (2001b) essay 'Character and Anal Eroticism', which, likewise, takes collecting practices to be informed by instinctive impulses, only with a psychosexual twist. As Penzel (2014) notes, collectors are seen to display anal characteristics: parsimony, obstinacy and rigidity. In holding onto possessions, and sublimating his or her desires into things, the collector is considered to be stuck in a state of arrested development. Everything from 'intense "burning" ambition' to an interest in money finds its 'formula' in anal erotic impulses (ibid.).
Ernest Jones consolidates the identification of anal fixation as a key feature of the collector's personality in his paper 'Anal Erotic Character Traits' (1923), adding the idea that the hobby is governed by an 'impulse to gather, collect and hoard' (cited in Penzel, 2014, p. 13). For Jones, the anal-eroticism of the collecting habit is manifest in the objects that the collector singles out for his affections: The objects collected are nearly always typical copro-symbols: thus money, coins (apart from current ones), stamps, eggs, butterfliesthese two being associated with the idea of babiesbooks, and even worthless things like pins, old newspapers etc. (ibid.) The collector projects and sublimates his anal fixation onto the material world, finding culturally respectable substitutions to cast in his psychosexual drama. The filth of the mind is, thus, tidied up and channelled into seemingly honourable and orderly pursuitscopro-symbols, nevertheless, which to the psychoanalytically trained eye provide a reflection of the collector's anal-erotic inner life.
Mirror-logic continues in Freud's topography of the psyche, which, at least in its earliest drafts, offers an exemplary model of bourgeois tidiness with itsadmittedly 'crude'analogy of the unconscious and preconscious mind with the domestic space of the hallway and drawing room (Malcolm, 2012, p. 29). Presided over by a 'watchman', the threshold operates as a border between repressed and potentially conscious thought: the mental impulses that are admitted to the drawing room effectively enter the preconscious realm and await the attentions of the eye of consciousness located at the other end of the room. The job of the watchman is, consequently, to maintain the order of the preconscious, which acts as an antechamber for the conscious mind, the room of respectable, well-kept thought.
Freud's attempt to tidy the dreams of Jung (Jung, 1989, p. 160)into 'something that suited his theories'provided the decisive moment for Jung's development of ideas such as the collective unconscious (and, ultimately, his departure from Freudian psychoanalysis). The dream in question, which Freud insisted was bound up with the death-wish, all the same, offers an exceptional instance of house/mind thinking. Dreaming of a house, Jung finds himself descending the stairs while going back in time: from the rococo period of the salon in the upper storey via the fifteenth century to the Roman times of the basement and eventually, through a trapdoor, into the primitive scene of a cave beneath the property. Resisting what he saw as Freud's death obsessed interpretation, Jung sees the house as 'a kind of image of the psyche' (ibid.). He elaborates: Consciousness was represented by the salon … The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious. The deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene became. In the cave, I discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is, the world of the primitive man within myselfa world which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness. (ibid.) In contrast to Freud's house/mind schema, the clutter of Jung's scheme accrues in the upper floors, the space of consciousness, which are fussy and ornamental in style.
If, for psychoanalysis, the mind is shaped like a house, it soon follows that the house is readable as a reflection of the mind. Just as Jung went on to build his dream house at Bollingen, on the shores of Lake Zurichfor him 'a symbol of psychic wholeness' (cited in Cooper Marcus, 1995: np) so the idea of house design takes on psychological and even spiritual significance. Cooper Marcus (1995), for instance, offers a Jungian approach to dwelling in The House As a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home, and, in the process, explores 'the accounts of people who have learned to truly express who they are via their choice of house: by remodelling a dwelling as family needs change … by changing the décor after the end of a relationship, by coming to terms with the inevitable tensions between clutter and tidiness' (np). As the ideal house takes on the architectural shape of psychological health and wellbeing, conversely, the dysfunctional house reflects its inhabitant's dysfunction. For Marcus, those who become 'stuck', that is, 'excessive[ly] bond[ed] to one house or its contents' betray unresolved issues with respect to their 'relationship to home in childhood or to one parent in that home' (np).
Psychoanalysis, thus, helps to establish powerful analogies between material culture, the domestic interior and unconscious behaviour, many of which carry into contemporary diagnostic criteria around hoarding disorder. As Frost and Steketee (2014) note, Freudian notions of anality and parsimony inform the classification of OCPD in the second edition of the DSM (see also Penzel, 2014). Hoarding behaviour then becomes an established diagnostic indicator for OCPD in DSM-III-R (Mataix Cols et al, 2010). By the time of the publication of DSM-IV, the problem of letting go of 'worn-out worthless objects even when they have no sentimental value' (ibid.) has become a constituent feature of OCPD, marking the consolidation of a linkage between holding onto material possessions with personality disorder.
However, in the transition between DSM-IV and the most recent revision interventions from the field of cognitive neuroscience have served to pull hoarding away from psychodrama and towards neurobiological models. Mataix-Col et al, put it bluntly: 'The syndrome is not solely a result of social deviance or conflicts in society' (p. 566). The development process for DSM-V took in research from neuroimaging studies, for instance, which aimed to establish a neural substrate for hoarding behaviour distinct from that of OCD and OCPD (Mataix-Cols et al, 2010, p. 563). Significantly, elements of this research seek to establish homologies between animal behavioural patterns, such as nesting, burrowing, scatter-hoarding and stowing away food, with human hoarding practices: 'The strongest evidence for a homology derives from the fact that the behaviour across species relies upon similar neural processes in the mesolimbocortical system' (Preston, 2014, p. 188) Such research, taken together with models influenced by behavioural economics and other neuropsychological approaches, evidences a decisive move away from familial, social or cultural accounts of hoarding towards patterns of brain activity.
In addition to revealing animal-like cognitive schemes, neural imaging also 'implicate[s] dysfunction of the anterior cingulate cortex and other ventral and medial prefrontal cortical areas that mediate decision-making, attention, and emotional regulation' (Saxena, 2008, p. 297;my emphasis). Recent research thus places emphasis upon questions of organisation and data processing, seeing the hoard as visible evidence of 'problems with categorisation, attention and decision making' (ibid.). With this, clutter becomes an information age problem, a volumetric indicator reflecting an equivalent heap of unmade decisions and uncategorised information.
Moving beyond the clinic, the idea of hoarding as homological between human and non-human animals finds unlikely confirmation in Heideggerian notions of dwelling. Making a foundational distinction between human and animal, Heidegger determines dwelling as an act of excavation as opposed to the nesting, embedding tendencies of non-humans. If animals enclose themselves in their environments, humans disclose, opening up spaces and pushing nature aside in the name of culture and civilisation. Ingold summarises: … the space of dwelling is one that the [human] inhabitant has formed around himself by clearing the clutter that would otherwise threaten to overwhelm his existence. (Ingold, 2011, p. 82) Human dwelling is contingent, then, on a process of unearthing and space clearing.
In his more positive philosophical account of dwelling, Levinas (1969) establishes, nevertheless, the indivisibility of psychic and domestic space: in Totality and Infinity psychological interiority is predicated upon the space of home as a place of retreat from the harsh exteriority of the world. For Bachelard (1994, p. xxxvii), likewise, 'our soul is an abode' and the poetics of the house resonate deeply with aspects of human psychology. Notions of shelter, dwelling, refuge, intimacy, secrecy, quietude, dreaming are materially expressed in the built environment, giving rise to the need for what he terms 'topo-analysis': 'On whatever theoretical horizon we examine it, the house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being' (xxxvi).
Benjamin, as Sloterdijk (2009) notes, offers a more historically and materially engaged take on the domestic interior, deploying the house (specifically interior decoration) as a tool not for the analysis of the timeless soul but, instead, of 'capitalist man in the 19th century' (p. 2). Even so, the home is viewed as a compensatory realm reflective of fantasy, sensory intoxication and the exclusion of the outside world of work and politics. The domestic interior, then, becomes not only the 'plastic expression of the personality' (Benjamin, 2002b, p. 20), it simultaneously illuminates 'the phantasmagoria of capitalist culture' (Benjamin, 2002a, p. 8). Nineteenth century interior designs, ultimately, are analogous of modernity itself as 'furnished man' (Benjamin, 2005, p. 5) sinks into his plush surroundings. Baudrillard's (2005, p. 92) take on the domestic interior of later capitalism echoes Benjamin's analysis in tracing the logic of capital that is seen to run through the desire to 'construct a world, a private totality', of which the collection is the privileged example. Objects, together with their systems, operate as mirrors, instruments aiding and abetting narcissistic projection: 'as a mirror the object is perfect, precisely because it sends back not real images, but desired ones. In a word, it is a dog of which nothing remains but faithfulness' (p. 96). The collector of objects, in attempting to possess them is in fact striving to secure him or herself: 'the creation of a total environment, to that totalization of images of the self that is the basis of the miracle of collection. For what you really collect is always yourself' (p. 97).
The connection between narcissism and interior design is, needless to say, gendered and the association of the female body with the domestic sphere has a long history, becoming a commonplace by the start of the twentieth century (Briganti and Mezei, 2013). Emily Burbank's Woman as Decoration (1917), for instance, exemplifies the promotion of a convergence between a woman's bodily appearance and her furnishings with chapter titles such as 'Intelligent Expressing of Self in Mis-en-Scene' and 'Woman Decorative in Her Sun Room' (in Briganti and Mezei, 2013). One of the most attentive novelists of the domestic interior, Edith Wharton provides a damning portrait of the woman-as-decoration furnishing phenomenon in The House of Mirth, not before having it both ways though, by offering her own design advice in The Decoration of Houses (Agnew, 2013). As Lee (2008, p. 134) has shown, Wharton's book had a 'marked influence on house design in America', not to mention upon other designers. Elsie de Wolfe's The House in Good Taste (1913), for instance, shared many of Wharton's rather judgmental views on the ideal interior and was adamant in insisting that 'a woman's environment will speak for her whether she likes it or not' (cited in Lee, 2008, p. 135).
This idea of the house betraying its inhabitants, as Highmore (2002) notes, inaugurates the birth of detective fiction: Sherlock Holmes reads the interior for clues to a murder as 'furnished man' leave his physical, hence traceable, impression on the upholstery. As a character, Holmes offers an interesting reversal of tidy house, tidy mind logic, though, in the contrast between the clutter of his domestic space and the sparsely furnished scheme of his 'brain-attic' (Conan Doyle, 2009a, p. 21). If, 'in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction' (Conan Doyle, 2009b, p. 372), Holmes, simultaneously, keeps his mind clear: I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things … (Conan Doyle, 2009a, p. 21) In stark contrast to James' evolutionary idea of aggregated mind-stuff, Holmes likes things orderly and perpetually decluttered in his head, instead allowing a kind of fossil-record of congealed objects to form in his living quarters.
Holmes' untidy house/tidy mind disposition shares an affinity with Phillip's (2000) psychoanalytic reading of the Francis Bacon's studio. As part of Phillip's therapeutic work with a young artist who complained of compulsively frustrating his own artistic practice by cluttering up his canvases, analyst and analysand debate the mess of the studio environment, drawing particular attention to the way in which the clotted hoard that formed the floor of Bacon's studio space contrasts with the clarity of the subjects populating the canvas. If Bacon's clutter was seen to work for him, then, the analysis pursued the question of how to use clutter to unblock the canvas for the analysand. The responsibility of Phillips as the analyst was to effectively hold the mess and resist the temptation to organise it into a convenient, ready-made psychoanalytic signscape.
From an object-relations perspective (Winnicott), clutter provides the means for both defensive and creative action, inaugurating good and bad mess. On the one hand, it can serve to frustrate: '[Winnicott's] false self personality, in his words, "collects demands" to clutter up his life: to baffle and evade his desire, to protect but starve his true self' (Phillips, 2000, p. 60). Although, on the other, to elaborate a theme that remains implied in Phillips' analytical method, the notion of transitional space is characterised as the provision of an appropriately messy, crucially physical and material, area between mother and child. If the child is to stand a chance of healthy individuation then they must be given the space to play, to experiment with not-me objects and possessions and, crucially, to make a mess (Winnicott, 1990). Transitional space is, then, necessarily cluttered and disorderlyat least from the adult's point of viewand must remain so. Winnicott is clear about the prospective psychic damage that ensues should the adult fill the space with his or her own desires and needs: The potential space between baby and mother, between child and family, between individual and society or the world … can be looked upon as sacred to the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living. By contrast, exploitation of this area leads to a pathological condition in which the individual is cluttered up with persecutory elements of which he has no means of ridding himself. (Winnicott, 2005, p. 139) In other words, the good disorder of transitional space must not be ordered by anyone other than the child nor must it be cluttered up with desires or creative products and solutions not belonging to the child. Winnicott extends this warning to the figure of the analyst, who must remain a benign presence in the face of the analysand's attempts to find their own path in the analysis. The goodenough analyst, like the good-enough mother must endeavour not to be too house-proud if they are to furnish the optimum environment for the patient.

From Object Relations to Object Orientations
For advocates of objects, object relations, nevertheless, has major shortcomings. Winnicott's (2005) transitional mess with its vibrant account of the importance of material things (not-me experiences extend crucially into contact with not-human entities) tends to evaporate as even the optimum transitional object is gradually abandoned, leaving its composite escapades to somehow dissipate into culture. In Winnicott's reckoning, then, the material world is reduced to a series of props designed for human purposes of separation and individuation. As Bogost (2012, p. 3) would see it: 'all existence is drawn through the sieve of humanity, the rich world of things discarded like chaff so thoroughly, so immediately, so efficiently that we don't even notice'. Psychoanalytic tidiness thus creeps back into the scene of analysis as material, not-me things ultimately serve human purposes. In Phillips' case study, especially, Freudian notions, such as reaction-formation, projection and introjection, shepherd the analysand's mess back into the fold of analytical confidence (Buchanan, 2011), leading, in the consideration of Bacon's art, to a 'kind of homology between the state of the studio and the work produced there' (ibid., np; my emphasis). In other words, it all boils down to a logic of projection and introjection: Bacon projects the state of his mind onto his studio space and the analysand introjects the psychodrama of his bohemian upbringing and projects its frustrations onto his canvases. Either way, canvas and studio in the end serve as mirrors, reflecting inner, psychic turmoil and good mess is reduced to a matter of mind.
For both Bateson (2000) and Barad (2007), homologies, analogies and reflections make for exceptionally bad science in that they disavow the entanglement of the investigatortogether with her or his apparatusesin the scene of investigation. Critical of the foundational status of comparative anatomy in zoological theory, Bateson, for instance, undermines the idea of homology and analogy as a reliable means of exploring cultural similarities and differences. The mistakes of psychoanalysis, in particular, consist less in the identification of patterns in behaviour than in its tendency to present loose thinking 'as more concrete' than it is: 'We are all familiar with this loose use of words in such phrases as: (…) "he was influenced by his emotions"; "his symptoms are the result of conflict between his superego and his id" ' (p. 82). As far as such words stay loose, operating as place holdersor knots in handkerchiefs to use Bateson's imageindicating the need for further investigation, psychoanalysis has much to offer; masquerading as hardened fact, however, it becomes something altogether more contentious.
Barad would agree, placing emphasis upon the performativity of scientific practice. Just as Bateson insists on perpetually reworking his anthropological apparatusesthe categories, concepts, rules and formulations that form the instruments of anthropologyso Barad (2007, p. 817) insists upon the apparatus not only as an 'open-ended' practice but also as an entangling phenomenon of what she terms intra-activity (that is, proceeding from a position of inextricable involvement with what is isolated as a proposed 'object' of enquiry). If 'boundaries do not sit still' (ibid.) then mirrors, reflections and analogies are profoundly unstable instruments capable of little more than distortion.
What this means for a consideration of hoarding, above all, is that the clinical apparatus used to identify specific 'cases'from its psychodramatic version to its more recent neurobiological configurationis in need of major adjustment. The reliance upon a culturally diffuse mirror-logic not only places professionals and clinicians (and their equipment) outside of the clinical scenes they assess, it supports the illusion that the situation of hoarding is merely one involving flawed individuals and inert things. The grandiose idea that things exist for us and, more, that we are capable of separating ourselves cleanly from them is as powerful a fiction as that of tidy houses reflecting tidy minds. Latour (1994, p. 64), among others, questions the extent to which humans might achieve any clear separation from the non-human world, preferring, instead, to speak of an entirely enmeshed state of co-constitution: 'we are sociotechnical animals … we are never limited to social ties. We are never faced with objects ….
[Things] deserve better. They deserve to be housed in our intellectual culture as fully-fledged social actors. They mediate our actions? No, they are us'.

Conclusion
In the absence of any consideration of this entanglement, not least the social situation of an aggressive consumer culture that invests in new powers of magnetism and attraction, diagnostic frameworks are securing forced confessions. To extend the discourse of the police procedural, hoarders are literally being framed, that is, held solely to account for crimes they did not commit, whereas their accomplicesthe things that usually dominate the roomremain unconsidered and unquestioned. What this means for a consideration of the circumstances of Hoarding Disorder is that a crucial cohortthe constituents of the hoard itselfis missing from the investigation. By insisting upon a model of an autonomous human subject/addict that is discrete, clean and bounded, who, then, lapses into pathological relationships with things (throwing up mirror images of their psyches as they go), clinicians, pop psychologists and their followers produce a situation that results in blame and condemnation. The humans that are left to carry the can have little defence. In the words of one reality TV 'case'labelled by the resident psychotherapist as prodigiously stubbornin response to the question 'what do you feel is an unresolved emotional issue in you?': 'I can't answer that question' (ibid.).
Nonetheless, the cultural dominance of 'reflection as a pervasive trope for knowing' (Barad, 2007, p. 72), not to mention its domestic incarnation 'tidy house/tidy mind' with its notion of a hermeneutic psychological truth buried in piles of stuff, is at the heart of the problem: as Fuss (2004, p. 11) notes, 'the modern fantasy that the domestic interior and all its furnishings illuminate the personality of its inhabitant is, of course, no less powerful or pervasive for being a fantasy'. In short, if we are to do justice to the phenomenon of hoarding, and to consider its aetiology beyond simple stories of pathological humans, or even pathological capitalism, we must first dispense with the mirror Life Writing (OCLW) and Dr. Colin Wright, who provided valuable opportunities to rehearse some of the paper's arguments. Finally, the anonymous reviewers provided generous and insightful feedback, which has made for a sharper argument by far.

About the Author
Tracey Potts is Lecturer in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham and Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford (2013/2014). She is the co-author of Kitsch! Cultural Politics and Taste (with Ruth Holliday) and is currently working on a cultural biography of clutter and procrastination entitled Neither Use Nor Ornament, for which she has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (for details see: www.nottingham.ac.uk/cct/ research/neither-use-nor-ornament.aspx).