The reason for the commencement of this research was I and the realization that I have a highly developed collecting obsession and activity (newspapers, magazines and objects). Trying in fact to understand my own psychological makeup, the deepest reasons and the function of the personalized selection, collection and storage of mostly worthless objects, I began to assume that there is perhaps some particular connection among the psychological makeup of the people who-each for his own reasons-applies collection practices.

Thus, studying at first this obsession and then other examples of real people as well as fictional characters, from past and present times, their alternative methods of classification, storage and filing but mostly the collection idiosyncrasy of each one of them, I attempt to prove that collecting, each object separately from its acquisition and keeping, creates a particular pleasure (enjoyment). It comprises a personal and priceless value, it carries in it a kind of memory-a memory of those it substitutes-, a memory that manages to attract in such a way so as to cause at the same time pain. Pain for the things that connect you with it, but mainly for the indubitable inability to part with them. Our relation with the objects that we collect –usually with no particular criterion- and also the idea itself of collection practice is almost obsessive and at times-according to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben- “pathological”. Our obsession to select them, gather them, “save” them, keep their lifeless “soul”, offer them duration and the possibility of future recall creates this strange dipole of pleasure-pain. The idea of time in conjunction with memory leads us to establish their “imperishability” and duration. They are our own “life documents” we exist through their existence, we approach death, we try to reconcile with it and maybe transcend it.

Such a personal observation, through inner quest and arduous efforts, has led to the detection of deeper psychoanalytical routes and the discovery that many of the characteristics of the collecting activity had already been described and diagnosed, for completely different reasons, by Freud as he developed his theory on “the principle of pleasure”, fetish, mourning and melancholy.

The aim therefore of this research is the study and the attempt to prove the acknowledgement that Freud’s theory relates to many people who in the course of time have applied some kind of collection practice. The typology of the collectors and collection practices that are developed then, aim at two things. First, that modern art itself is connected to collection practice and second, that each case, no matter how different it is, has as common basis the “makeup entity” of each collector as that is described by Freud and the theory he developed in 1915. Using the above as starting point, we record some characteristic cases of collectors as they emerged from the research that was made.