History of Hoarding: Prior Knowledge and Extended Reading

Hoarding has always interested me as a condition from an early age, and probably stems from me being diagnosed with mild OCD last year. Hoarding and OCD have been linked in a number of books, as they both have similar characteristics deriving from perfectionism and the need to have a collection of things in order. Although hoarders are often stereotypically considered to messy human beings, which is the opposite of what OCD is, some hoarders simply have a large and out of control collection that they love and cherish.

I first was exposed to hoarding through reading the books by Arthur Conan Doyle titled "Sherlock Holmes". Within these books, he commented in detail about Sherlock's need to collate papers and store them within his home. However, throughout history there have been many occasions where hoarding has been mentioned, but as we progress through time, there seems to have been a slowly increasingly negative representation of these people.

The earliest reference I have read was a poem by Dante Aligheri titled Divine Comedy, which was written in the early 14th century. His poem guides us through how to descend through the 9 circles of Hell and come out in Paradise. In the fourth circle of Hell, we are greeted by two people crashing against each other with enormous boulders or rocks attached to their body. The poem reads:

"Why do you hoard?" and the other: "Why do you waste?"

"Hoarding and squandering wasted all their light

and brought them screaming to this brawl of the wraiths.

You need no words of mine to grasp their plight."

These two peoples lives where defined by acquiring possessions and either storing them away from the world within their homes, or destroying them. This is the first, and only severe negative representation of hoarding from this early on in history, and is represented as being a sin and something to be looked down on in the modern day; which I will discuss later.

Hoarding, as defined by the International OCD Foundation, is "not being able to let go of things. Throwing away, selling, giving away, or even recycling are very difficult for people who hoard."

http://hoarding.iocdf.org/dante_to_dsm-v.aspx