A psychology of materialism: Contributions of development and culture to our material longing

Material goods play a vital and central role in people's lives. We use the things in our lives to help us satisfy needs that we are aware of as well needs that lay outside of our consciousness. Throughout the human lifespan, people use objects to aid in their biological, psychological, and social development. These material goods house a great deal of meaning that is couched within the contexts of human development as well as the culture we collectively create. Infants and children use their material world as a bridge between their subjective position and the larger world around them. Objects can hold meaning for children. The security that a child may associate with a transitional object may aid in the separation from their caregiver and can enable them to explore and discover elements of the world outside of them. As a child develops, his needs also develop. Material goods help adolescents cope with their development into individuals who are separate from their family of origin. Anxieties raised by this second separation, or individuation, may be assuaged by the security of material goods as was the case in childhood. A teenager's things, like clothing or music, may offer them a way to safely explore and express themselves and develop the identity they will carry with them into adulthood. Through adolescence and into adulthood, objects continue to provide opportunities for people to pursue talents, develop skills, and express elements of themselves to the world at large. Adults may employ material goods to aid in their development and expression of parental or professional selves that are unique to the responsibilities and expectations of adulthood. The contributions that development makes to people's relationships with material goods emerge within the context of culture and are therefore influenced by it. Through the development of a Western industrialized culture, our perceptions of our needs have been affected by the development of mass production and advertising. The priority of commercial success has influenced the meaning that advertising gives objects, and in turn affects the meaning material goods have for their owners. It is the hypothesis of this author that the meaning contained in our relationships with objects can be explained through examination of the interactions among people's biological or instinctual drives, environmental demands that must be met for the sake of survival, and the construction and induction of new needs. This dissertation integrates information from historical, ethnological, and human developmental as well as clinical psychological theory and research data to support the hypothesis. The conclusion of this dissertation presents a synthesis of the developmental and cultural contributions to the relationships people maintain with their objects as well as the limitations of this conceptual analysis.