ABSTRACT
Not long ago I came across a box of my old possessions, containing a picture book of farmyard animals entitled My Farmyard Friends. My mother had sent the material years earlier, when clearing out my juvenilia, and it had long languished until the time came for another generational spring clean. My Farmyard Friends immediately evoked vivid recall, in the finest detail, of its pictures. It also brought back a much darker memory, but more of that shortly. I was particularly struck by the fact that it was only the physical presence of the actual book itself which apparently could provide sufficient context or cues for the re-emergence of long-inaccessible associated visual memories, memories which probably could never have otherwise re-emerged, no matter how careful and extensive the verbal prompting. Indeed, we all know how finding an old theatre ticket in a long-disused suit pocket can bring back many a long-forgotten emotional memory. Maybe we should hoard all life’s trivia, fully to recapture old loves, triumphs and disasters! Maybe it is some such similar subconscious ‘awareness’ of the potentiality of inanimate objects which underlies the phenomenon, and pathology, of the clinical condition nowadays known as ‘hoarding’, where real pain on parting with collected and assiduously accumulated junk is experienced.
