An ashtray from a coffee shop, a hanger from a fitness club, a shoehorn from a hotel… Why do some people take items they don’t really need?
“When I stay at a hotel, I always take branded envelopes and pens, shampoo bottles with me,” Oleg, 35, admits. “I understand that I’m unlikely to use them at home, but I still take them — just like that, as a keepsake.”
These unnecessary little things symbolically help prolong the pleasure associated with the holiday. More recently, bright bottles and beautiful wrappers were a rarity in our country. Brought from abroad, they seemed to be something magical. “Today we can buy everything we need,” explains existential psychotherapist Svetlana Krivtsova, “but some of us still want to collect these pretty trinkets, as if compensating for a shortage left in the distant past.”
The sweetness of the forbidden fruit
A plastic shower cap, a glass ashtray or a spoon from a cafe — as a rule, items that we appropriate — are not essential. And yet, many find it difficult to resist. In part, this is similar to the behavior of a kleptomaniac who takes things not for profit, but under the influence of impulse. However, if the passion for unmotivated theft, as a rule, is unconscious and involuntary, then our heroes are aware of their act, but repeat it again and again.
“Rejecting a non-strict taboo that is not directly related to the requirements of morality, they thus try to feel inner lightness and freedom,” Svetlana Krivtsova believes. — Their actions turn out to be akin to an innocent childish prank — like sticking your tongue out at the teacher behind his back. The children’s habit of taking pleasure on the sly leads to the fact that someone else’s trifle pleases an adult sometimes more than an expensive gift — perhaps because it returns to childhood with its happy impunity.
make up for the lack
Feeling embarrassed, those who like to appropriate someone else’s are looking for a rational explanation for their actions. But this is only a pretext: in fact, a person who takes something that does not belong to him often tries to make up for some long-standing loss in this way. 29-year-old Elena used to carry erasers, hairpins, notepads from her classmates as a child. So she tried to drown out the feeling of loss that arose in her after the sudden divorce of her parents: it seemed to her that she had an inner right to rob girlfriends from complete families, because they had something that she herself was desperately lacking.
“It feels like I was robbed” — such words are heard from people who have lost something important, — comments Jungian analyst Yulia Kazakevich. – Appropriating unnecessary things, a person seems to be performing a calming ritual: taking someone else’s, he experiences the feeling of returning the stolen and at the same time convinces himself that the stolen is a trifle of little value. And all in order to protect yourself from resentment and impotent anger associated with a real loss.
have to be
“I have the right to do so,” say those who take what they don’t need. Indeed, it is not forbidden to taste fruits from the supermarket stand. “But, abusing this, a person behaves as if he is everywhere at home,” explains Svetlana Krivtsova. — He does not feel boundaries and by his behavior proves to himself that he is better and more significant than others. However, the self-awareness that he achieves in this case is the strength of the weak: he lacks confidence in himself and others in order to enter into adult, equal relationships with them and, for example, openly ask permission to take the thing he likes.