Psychiatrist labels extreme saving a personality disorder

Freud, savings and the sphincter: psychiatry judges your wallet

Can a psychiatrist diagnose saving? In a couple's argument, a mental health professional argues that thriftiness—extreme, militant saving—is not a virtue but a personality disorder. The explanation doesn't come from a modern manual: it comes from Freud, infant sphincter control, and the pleasure of retention. From there, the issue turns into a reckoning with the very idea of saving.

The Freudian thesis: from sphincter to purse

The approach is old-school textbook material. Freud studied the obsessive personality linked to saving and ascetic living, contrasting it with the open, generous, expansive personality, which he attributed greater capacity for productive dynamics and a childhood without guilt regarding defecation. The extreme saver, the ascetic, and the miser would remain anchored in the pleasure of retention. Parents, according to this reading, would have viewed the act without repression as something reprehensible.

As an after-dinner joke, the theory has its charm. As a diagnosis, it falls apart upon close inspection: it turns an economic habit—spending little—into a clinical structure, invoking a school of thought born over a century ago. The most repeated objection doesn't ask for proof, but to separate the couch from the cash register. A psychiatrist is not a partner. And a partner, however qualified, is not a consultation.

Is saving a symptom? What psychiatry itself debates

The DSM is not the table of law, skeptics of the express diagnosis reply: it is a revisable classification, and even the discipline itself does not agree on its borders. That someone watches every cent at the supermarket does not appear as a disorder on any serious list. What does appear in clinical manuals is obsessive-compulsive disorder: its criteria speak of obsessions and compulsions that generate distress and impairment, not price comparison.

The other half of the argument attacks from the opposite flank. If we are talking about pathologies, the behavior that does not adapt to the system is the contrary one: consuming beyond necessity, going into debt to buy what advertising dictates, throwing away food. For some of the replies, the problem is not who retains, but who cannot stop spending; waste is the disease that no one diagnoses because it moves the economy. This inversion of the burden of proof disorients more than any paper.

From second-hand shower screen to the €2,300 handbag

Here the matter leaves theory and shows invoices. One experience boasts of a used shower screen for €20 on a second-hand platform, installed at home with €4 of silicone, two hours of work, eight screws, and eight anchors: one euro more. The complete breakdown, screw by screw, is trinc in the original with more detail than fits here. The conclusion is not so much saving as self-sufficiency.

At the other end of the counter appears the perfect punchline: the same person who diagnoses saving as pathology goes home with a €2,300 handbag bought on sale and matching shoes for €1,200. The watched cent versus the unleashed shop window. In between, a star expense summarized without shame: the most expensive thing of the year, a second-hand bike for €150.

How much saving is too much? No one sets the threshold

Missing is the figure that would turn this into science: the threshold. No one gives it. One case describes someone who has not wasted anything from age 24 to 32 and dedicates everything else to saving and investment. Another calculates they would only take saving to the extreme if it allowed them to retire in 15 years; meanwhile, continuing to work like a rat seems foolish to them. And a third, in a couple, spends less in a whole year than their partner in a single tech purchase, with a salary four times lower.

What is striking is that everyone describes the same pattern with the inverted label. For some it is discipline; for others, antiestéticar. The difference is not in the bank account, but in whether the brake is applied by oneself or imposed by the pocket.

Disguised poverty or learned lesson?

Against the clinical reading emerges the sociological one: thriftiness would be poverty disguised as efficient management. Those who practice it out of preference have a cushion; those who practice it out of antiestéticar have a past. The most widespread criticism relies on memory: a generation that went through hardships did not have a disorder, they had a lesson.

The uncomfortable point also slips in. Some recall that dying with €435,000 in the bank is not better than dying with €434,000, and that six-figure assets exist incapable of affording a cheap whim. And on the other side, the logic of the price cap: if tomatoes are €1.70 per kilo, you eat something else; at €1.20, you buy them. Neither pathology nor epic. Just a rule.

The drift: when the label generalizes

Much of the exchange ends where these matters usually end: in broad generalizations about who spends and who does not based on gender, and judgments about the private lives of third parties. They provide not a single data point and as a diagnosis are worth less than the Freudian theory itself that peine fire.

The summary is another. A behavioral trait—saving—was placed under a clinical label, and the label fell. What remains standing is not a disorder: it is a domestic discrepancy elevated to category. And if extreme saving were truly a disease, one would have to see who pays for therapy. Because the only diagnosis that withstands the bill is the usual one: the one that decides with someone else's wallet.