Existing comprehensive theories are important not because they are fully developed explanations of human behavior, but because they ask most of the important questions about the subject in a coherent fashion.
(Maddi & Costa, 1972, p. ix)
Articulating general principles that govern behavior, including self-exploration and observation of others, is something many individuals can become proficient in.
Someone who had extensive knowledge in this area was trait theorist Henry Murray.
Murray had considerable interest in human traits and characteristics. He received his background training in the medical field, obtaining a medical degree from Columbia in 1919 and then completing a doctorate in biochemistry from Cambridge 9 years later. This set the foundation for his work with Jung. After Murray read one of Jung’s books and arranged a meeting with him, Jung encouraged Murray to study psychoanalysis, which he eventually did at Harvard University. With his unique background in both medical and analytical training, Murray focused on the basic need principle in personality, which he called psychogenic needs. He believed these needs were largely at the unconscious level, and he located 27 needs that he believed were influenced and carried out by environmental forces. “He called these forces ‘press,’ referring to the pressure they put on us that forces us to act’ ” (AllPsych Online, 2011, p. 2). However, Murray believed there was a difference between real environmental pressures and those that are merely perceived. Murray developed the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), which measured personality themes as well as unconscious motivations, and has stood up to the research.
According to Murray, in the personalities of all people lie both rational and irrational processes, with a large measure of rationality. With that said, Freudian theory states that human behavior originates in, and is determined largely by, unconscious, inexorable, selfish, primitive impulses. Freud believed ego to be a
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rational agent. Individuals respond and interact with both external and internal forces where drives are formulated, usually love and death respectively.
According to this extreme view, whatever rationality man seems to express in thought processes involving planning, decision making, and achieving intellectual understanding is in large measure defensive use of cognition in order to conceal the underlying irrational impulses that are the basic determinants of functioning.
(Maddi & Costa, 1972, p. 25) For some, irrational unconscious processes can be seen in hoarders as incon - sistencies, compulsions, and ego-alien acts.
There is growing interest in applying psychology to the solution of many current social and environmental problems, and those venturesome psychologists who have gone into the field have returned with the news that there is much needed knowledge about human behavior that is hard to deduce either from work in the laboratory or the clinic. (Maddi & Costa, 1972, p. xii)
Murray (1981) states that “personology” is a more accurate term to describe the branch of psychology focusing on the study of human lives and the different aspects that affect their direction; he calls “the psychology of personality” a clumsy and tautological expression (p. 10). He continues by clarifying that personology is psychology; it is what psychology should be about. Murray’s mission is clear:
Personalities constitute the subject matter for psychology, the life history of a single man being a unit with which this discipline has to deal and launches into the most important journey of his intellectual life by providing a new designation for his efforts.
(Murray, 1981, p. 97) Murry believes that breaking down the structure of each personality into elements and illuminating whatever merit that structure holds should be the task of a psychologist. When reflecting back on how the media and the collective society look at individuals who hoard, scrounge, or glean, the following thought from Murray is eloquent and provoking:
In our time, the capacities for wonder and reverence, for generous judgments and trustful affirmations, have largely given way, though not without cause surely, to their antitheses, the humors of a waning ethos: disillusionment, cynicism, disgust, and gnawing envy. These states have bred in us the inclination to dissect the subtlest orders of a man’s wit with ever sharper instruments of depreciation, to pour all values, the best confounded by the worst, into one mocking-pot to sneer “realistically,” and, as we say today, to “assassinate” character.
(Murray, 1981, p. 82)
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Whereas Murray pays particular attention to how personality plays out in the development of a person, Hillman focuses on the character of the individual as soul’s formative power influences and instigates behavior, patterning movements as an abstraction until it is met with a courageous will to live, its judicious decision, or its humor. In The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, Hillman (1999) stated,
“We make soul by embodying and enacting adjectives that differentiate the soul’s prolific potential. Through these characteristics, we come to know the nature of our soul and can assess the souls of others” (p. 11). The infrastructure of character is built by its qualities, which give it purpose and shape. Having a structured character is not necessarily connected to moral virtues. Staying true to form is a noble endeavor; however, that form may not be strong or true, but rather facile, sneaky, or even corrupt while still forming fate. Hillman imagines a person’s psyche to be full of characters—some who show up regularly and follow rules, and others who stay behind closed doors or only come out at night (p. 32).
John Tarrant (1998), in his book The Light Inside the Dark, writes that soul and spirit set up house in the place called character, which is a container to endure mortifications needed for growth of awareness and creative work (pp. 171–172). When the container of character is not intact, understanding character through its absence may feel like repetitive pain that seems unnecessary. Hillman (1999) believes that character is concerned with heart failures of love, inner truth, honor, and the suppression of beauty—trying to keep beauty absent so it doesn’t attack one’s heart and trigger ferocious longings one doesn’t know how to appease (p. 122). Again, Tarrant dovetails with Hillman’s observation in explaining that setting the container with inner awareness creates the strength by which individuals can hold life, allowing them to have weight, fertility, and endurance (pp. 175–177). In order to face the pain in our lives, it is important to start by looking compassionately and truthfully at our own minds. What types of characters live there? Anger, hate, unforgiveness, loss, loneliness? These characters become the norm of daily life; they are parts of the self that take on shadow qualities that keep an individual stuck in a debilitating disorder.
Like Tarrant, Hillman believes that character endures because it is a weight- bearing structure that individuals feel as a burden. Both Hillman and Tarrant discuss integrity in relationship to character in their respective books. “Integrity does not mean having a granite jaw. A filigree is also a pattern; a house of cards is also a structure” (Hillman, 1999, p. 12). It wants an individual to be what one is, nothing more or other, per Hillman. Tarrant explains that even though there is much invested in one’s direction in life, integrity means having the ability to turn about or change course, which he believes is more important than not making mistakes.
“Turning about is related to the ability to see the path as something that goes on and on, with infinite vistas. Our faults are always large and visible to all; compassion and perseverance are always necessary” (Tarrant, 1998, p. 201). Individuals have the capacity to separate themselves from old habits and wake up living more consciously. However, staying asleep (avoidance) seems to have a strong pull for individuals. Sitting at a crossroad, individuals continue to struggle with which path to choose: clarity and happiness or confusion and pain.
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Hillman goes on to state that each person’s fate is plotted and formed by soul’s active intelligence, entangling a person’s soul, drawing forth their character providing a glimpse into the great myths. Therefore, in order to gain insight into a hoarder’s struggles, a sense of myth and knowledge of myths is crucial, because myths show the imaginative structure inside their messes, and the background of the characters of myth can be located in human characters (Hillman, 1999, p. 11).
“Soul” has become a refuge of mystery and mist, a fairytale land of fantasy and feeling, of dream and reverie, of mood, symbol, and vibrations, a passive loveliness, ungraspable and vulnerable as a butterfly’s wing. The idea of form gives shape and character to soul and demands more rigor in thinking about it.
(Hillman, 1999, p. 11) As this book will show in Chapters 7 and 8, being able to study an individual’s personality (or a personology study) and character helps focus on important unresolved issues including the impact of early experiences on personality development, changes in the stability of personality over time, and character and temperament in contrast to situation in forecasting behavioral outcomes (Alexander, 1990, p. 10). Being able to describe referential points in time from childhood, adolescence, and old age to show consistencies over the life span, and also linking outcomes and the factors that influenced them, are crucial in understanding an individual’s hoarding dynamic. Being able to extract and retain what is critical or uncover something crucial to the pathology of an individual suffering with hoarding tendencies is imperative to achieve overall recovery and growth. Irving E. Alexander (1990), a clinical psychologist and cofounder of the Society for Personology, stated that extracting the salient aspects of an individual’s psycho biography and factoring them into common or unique sequential patterns allowed for effective processing of the data, uncovering dimensions of the individual not previously seen (p. 52).
This process speaks to the nature of understanding hoarding from another dimension outside of the clinical model. To understand hoarding tendencies, one must look past the symptomology and into the mystery of the behaviors of those trapped within their clutter. Murray and Hillman would concur that before any intervention can be applied with hoarders, it is important to learn more about how they see themselves, their options, and the environmental forces impinging upon them.
The modern worldview has assigned great importance to individualism, an ideal that has too often been degraded into a self-indulgent, egoistic, and aggressive quest for power and material gain (Schlitz, Amorok, & Micozzi, 2005, p. 11). For a healer, intensely personal inner work is needed and should be ongoing throughout one’s lifetime. The goal of a healer’s work is love and acceptance of self, which then allows for love and acceptance of others. Possessing an intact self for a healer can then promote the healing of another. According to William Benda in his excerpt entitled From Integrative to Integral Medicine: A Leap of Faith, “when the intent to
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heal another comes from our place of inner knowing, we instinctively and automatically know what to do” (cited in Schlitz et al., 2005, p. 36). Benda continues to maintain that what matters most is what is best for the patient, not a desire for financial gain, position, or power. Maintaining the patient’s trust is central to the therapy process, especially when difficult decisions need to be made for their welfare.
As a healer, equality and social justice are paramount to the therapeutic process and just as equal is allowing the patient to be the master of his or her body, mind, and soul- surrendering control as a healer, allowing the outcome to blossom into a sense of empowerment (Benda, cited in Schlitz et al., 2005, p. 37).
In order to exercise a more complete approach with patients, the importance of the therapeutic encounter between therapist and patient is vital. Patients must be allowed autonomy in therapy through informed options, placing the therapist in the sharing position and not the hierarchy/dictating position. The optimal therapeutic situation occurs when the therapist employs an individual treatment plan utilizing all modalities, conventional and alternative, that is tailored specifically to the patient’s needs where both can recognize the innate healing properties of the human body conducive to a healthy recovery (Benda, cited in Schlitz et al., 2005, p. 34).
As I see it, a psychologist should be concerned not only with the formulation of overt interpersonal verbal communications, the immediate (intended) effects of which are changes of some kind among the dispositions, evaluations, represented facts, interpretations, or commitments of the other person, but also with the formulation of covert introverted mental activities, the imme - diate (intended) effects of which are such things as: a better interpretation and explanation of some recalled event or of some current physical symptoms, a re-evaluation of one’s own enactions (past behaviors) or present abilities, the definition of the content and boundaries of a required concept, the composition of the plot of a story to be written, the resolution of a conflict between two purposes, or the ordination of a plan of action (tactics) to be executed at some future date.
(Murray, 1981, p. 20) Murray’s and Hillman’s beliefs on how psychologists should practice raise the question: how can a discipline that honors individual human behavior not spend considerable time studying and theorizing about the behavior of humans over their life span in their natural social and physical environments, taking into account their needs, options, and limitations? “Almost no one (other than anthropologists whose interests are not primarily psychological) takes any systematic account of what people do when freely behaving, what they have to say about their experience, and how they explain their behavior” (Maddi & Costa, 1972, p. x). Therefore, it is imperative that personologists focus on the macro events, or proceedings, as Murray would call them, to extract relevant variables like need, entity, configuration, process, succession, effect, place, route, and time that correspond to their purpose.
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Americans are receptive to factual information that leads to a diagnosis and treatment, but the pragmatism and objectivity in which they intellectually take pride can also create vulnerability to accepting answers that there are no valid questions.
Consequently, and in line with Murray, Alexander (1990) makes a controversial point in his book Personology when he states, “The study of a life lived is more likely to call attention to the explanation of those aspects of the life history which do not seem to flow easily from either common sense or simple psychological principles” (p. 9). To the inexperienced onlooker, who hoarders were and how they got this way may not be obvious. There is a curious fascination with those who have an abnormal condition.