Special Purpose Artifact

For many years, 46-year-old Elena has been transporting a heavy cast-iron foot-operated sewing machine from the Podolsk plant from apartment to apartment, from city to city. For the past three years, the “old fighting friend” has not been working, but the hostess finds a “red corner” for her anywhere. “My grandmother sewed on it during the war, and taught me. With the help of this machine, my prom dress and many other outfits were born. If I get rid of her, I will lose an important part of my life and strength, and I will also betray the memory of a dear person.

Our self-image includes not only a biography, life stages, but also what surrounds us: home, clothes, family. Psychologist William James wrote about this when he introduced the concept of an empirical «I». Moreover, we do not allow everything in our «I» in a row, but we make a selection. Sometimes it’s hard to understand why we «approved» one thing and didn’t accept another. Let’s try to figure out what is behind such attachment.

Sign of belonging to the genus

“Initially, the term “attachment” was used only in relation to an emotional connection with parents. Now it includes an attitude to nature, cities, districts, home and things, — explains Doctor of Science, author of the concept of the psychological space of personality Sofya Nartova-Bochaver. “Due to our attachment, the thing begins to have an exaggerated value.” An object that is kept in the family for a long time becomes a sign of family identity for us. And not necessarily a subject: identity can be, for example, gastronomic, when a recipe for a dish is passed on and reproduced from generation to generation.

“You can make pies according to my grandmother’s recipe, I’ll tell you how. But I know for sure that you won’t get that taste,” says 34-year-old Irina, “Both my grandmother, and my mother, and I always cooked “by eye”. No exact dosages. And so delicious that you lick your fingers. The presence of old things and stories (including recipes) keeps a connection with the past, if we consider belonging to the family as our resource. “But we are willing to part with what marks our past identity, which is irrelevant in the present,” Sofya Nartova-Bochaver continues. “Many people calmly remove wedding rings if the divorce goes without passions.”

Different nations have their own relations with the objective world. “In Japanese culture, an object that has been in the house for a long time, more than 100 years, begins to take on a life of its own. Among the Siberian peoples, it is believed that the deceased soul does not immediately enter the afterlife — it waits for about a year in some kind of thing, ”says Igor Lyubitov, a systemic family psychotherapist, ethnopsychologist. Family history manifests itself in different modalities: in relics, memories, legends. And it doesn’t matter how much a postcard, a doll, a knitted napkin, a table lamp that is significant for us costs … The circumstances under which we received them, or the events associated with them, give them a special meaning, endow them with aura, strength and energy.

“I had a tradition: as soon as I arrived at the dacha, I turned on the light and started the old grandmother’s alarm clock, which rattled like a tractor,” Sofya Nartova-Bochaver recalls with a smile. But one day it didn’t start. The panic began. I rushed to look for the same on the Internet, found and bought it. But I decided to fix the old one anyway. The female foreman changed the casing from blue to brown for him and explained the reason for the breakdown — “spring fatigue”, but reassured him: “His heart remained the same.” Now I have two tractors. Being a psychologist, I began to look for some parallels: the fatigue of the spring is the fatigue of the house, relationships, and God knows what else. Now I’m thinking about buying a blue casing, which the alarm clock had before. It is important for us that things keep their appearance, be the way they are remembered. This is the guarantee of constancy, immutability of the world and memories for us.

Baby doll instead of a monument

Those who grew up in the USSR have a special attitude towards property — extremely careful. After all, almost the entire Soviet era was accompanied by a total deficit. Many Soviet people were one big “Skilled Hands” circle: nothing was thrown away, and the apartments looked like warehouses. These things were not always needed, but — «Perhaps it will come in handy!». Even the word «string bag» itself was born in the Soviet era — all of a sudden you manage to buy something by chance. But not everything was determined by consumer demand.

“At all times in every family there were objects that the owners endowed with a special semantic load, symbolic wealth,” says Alla Salnikova, Doctor of Historical Sciences, researcher in the history of toys. “However, they do not necessarily have aesthetic or material value, but stories, legends, and sometimes secrets are associated with them: thanks to them, memory is passed on to the next generations.”

It happens that we do not even guess what memories are captured in the antique things that we have inherited, and yet we feel their influence. “There was a case in my practice: a young family turned to me. Together with the child, they settled in the grandmother’s apartment, — says Igor Lyubitov, — and the baby was very worried when dad brought him to a big baby doll: he was the size of a baby and sat on the closet. Then we found out that the father of the family had brothers and sisters about whom he knew nothing: they died before he was born. This toy was purchased for them. We began to understand how the «contact» of the doll and the baby takes place. Dad brought the boy to the closet, and it was not clear: whether the baby doll is shown to the child, or the child to the baby doll.

For my grandmother, this doll was an unconscious symbol of her grief for her dead children. And this meaning was transmitted in an elusive way through the father to the child, and he was worried. In fact, the baby doll has become something of a tombstone.

“The place for the monument is not at home, but in the cemetery,” Igor Lyubitov is convinced. — It happens that relatives keep urns with ashes at home. But this is rather an exception: in the Russian tradition, it is customary to bury the dead.” However, some of those who have lost loved ones arrange museums in the apartments, leaving the rooms of the departed and the whole environment intact. “This is an exaggerated, prolonged grief. In such houses, the living have to crowd or there is no place for them at all, ”comments the psychologist.

Emotional discomfort can be created even by jewels if they are associated with conflicts that arose and were not resolved in past generations. “My client received jewelry from her paternal grandmother,” Igor Lyubitov gives an example. “But I couldn’t wear them, not only because they were outdated.” It turned out that there was a lot of tension between her mother and grandmother, and the support of either side (both the acceptance of jewelry and the rejection of them) would have hurt her — hence the internal conflict. Therefore, not all things that cause strong feelings are safe to keep at home.

It is important to think about why we need them, what kind of emotions they cause and whether we want to continue experiencing them. We can learn to express connection with loved ones in ways other than through a relationship with a relic. It is worth trying new forms of memory in practice. “One woman could neither throw away nor return the old non-functioning gas stove given by her mother,” says Igor Lyubitov. “In our work, we came to understand that keeping this plate is an opportunity to be in emotional contact with the mother and it is worth looking for another way to get close to her.”

Farewell to the kettle

Is it always necessary to dig up the history of things? “If it doesn’t bother you, then it’s not necessary,” Igor Lyubitov believes. — But if you experience strong, especially negative emotions in relation to this or that object, it is worth sorting out and, possibly, getting rid of it. Especially if things are simply dangerous. For example, I know from the practice of colleagues that their clients kept harmful minerals or old blood pressure monitors on mercury, which chemically poisoned the owners. There is no time for sentiment and memory.

But what if the hand does not rise to throw away your grandfather’s favorite pen or uncle’s chest? Then you can transfer them to the museum, Igor Lyubitov believes.

And you can throw it away after conducting a preliminary farewell ritual, Sofya Nartova-Bochaver suggests: “When we throw things away, disidentification occurs and a new identity is marked. There is such a cinematic stamp: young people part, and one of them, passing by an asphalt skating rink, throws the key to the apartment under its roller (option — not under the skating rink, but into the river). And now — he or she is free!

Sometimes significant items are escorted with honors. Sofia Nartova-Bochaver tells a story about her student. He was fond of the art of the tea ceremony: it is believed that the teapot personifies solar (solar) power, and when we take it in our hands, there is an archetypal interaction with it. When the spout of the teapot broke off, the student turned to the guru, and he advised him to go to the «bright» stream, say words of gratitude and let go of his friend. But where in Moscow to find a «light» stream? Then a version of the ritual adapted to the metropolis was invented: to thank, put the pieces together and throw them into the garbage chute. Everyone can come up with their own farewell ritual with used utensils and clothes.

Pieces of joy from childhood

Things from the past often remind us of happy moments. Many adults, even if they had a difficult childhood (we are not talking about the Gulag, but about a “conditionally normal” childhood), remember this time with nostalgia. And if we have preserved old toys, they become a clear confirmation that there was happiness in childhood. Alla Salnikova gives an example: “Among the letters of the children of emigrants who left Russia after the revolution, there are letters from 10-year-old Mura Kogan. In them, the girl talks about moving to England, about the illness and death of her father. But much more about the doll that the British gave her in the orphanage: how she was dressed, what she played with her. Children’s escapism is a protective property of the psyche: children remember the good and displace the bad from their memory.

A special place among the “happy” relics is occupied by Christmas decorations: they are not only associated with moments of family celebration and magic, but often also very fragile. And if they still decorate our Christmas tree, we treat them with awe. “I still remember how my grandmother and I bought two toy huts in a store on the central square of Orenburg: bright crimson, powdered with snow, and gold,” says Alla Salnikova. “I am sitting in a sled, and I have a bag with these toys in my hands.” Nostalgia brings us back not to a place, but to a time that we can never repeat. What if the reluctance to part with things from the past is an attempt to remain children? At least in memories.