The history of museum collections and collectors

The Mind in the Matter: New Approaches to the Psychology of Collecting Psychology informs us about what drives an individual to collect. In the Enlightenment, the human mind was often analysed and discussed by means of metaphors and analogies borrowed from the world of collecting. In the nineteenth-century, the stereotypes surrounding the monomaniac, eccentric or perverse collector was codified in the art press and through fiction. In the twentieth century, the topic was treated at length by scholars such as Werner Munsterberger, often working in an explicitly psychoanalytic framework. Whilst this Freudian approach has been subject to intense criticism in the past thirty years, many scholars continue to interpret collecting in terms of categories such as ‘lack’, ‘surrogacy’, ‘desire’ and ‘loss’.

Müller Florian Martin, Das Archäologische Museum Innsbruck - Sammlung von Abgüssen und Originalen der Universität: Sammeln - Bewahren - Forschen - Vermitteln, in: Zentrum für Alte Kulturen (Hrsg.), Jahresbericht 2010. Aktuelle Forschungen (Innsbruck 2011) 51-53.