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Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives, by Werner Muensterberger; 295 pp. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1994, $29.95 cloth, $13.00 paper.
Due to the growth of museum studies, collecting practices are receiving more attention these days. Muensterberger's book is one of the more ambitious of recent studies in this area. He applies classical psychoanalytic concepts to collecting. Cultural theorists often say that collecting is dominated by neurotic, fetishistic, compulsive, or obsessional desires. Muensterberger is firmly in this camp, and his performance confirms rather than dispels the misgivings that nonpsychoanalytic students of culture have often expressed about the psychoanalytic approach.
The first two parts of the book are an exposition of the psychoanalytic view. The third treats several "case studies" of lunatic barons and desperate social climbers whose unbridled accumulation drove their families to ruin. The tales make for good reading. The final part of the book aims at a cultural history of collecting. This section strays farthest from Muensterberger's theoretical turf and suffers from a certain confusion of purpose. Much of it reads like a selection of case studies taken from the past rather than a history of collecting. In all, Muensterberger's cultural history of collecting does not compare favorably with the extensive work in art history on the origins of the museum. I will limit my discussion to his psychoanalytic account of collecting.
Muensterberger's psychoanalysis is starkly classical: collecting is essentially a compensation for prior disappointment and an illusory comfort in the face of an uncertain future. Collecting serves this role particularly well, it seems, because its repetitive structure allows the individual to repeat the tension-reducing act of acquisition when the satisfaction induced by the previous...