

After all, what other animal species can boast of slobs -- or neat freaks for that matter -- among its ranks? Even the famously filthy pig is quite a clean creature. And one would be hard-pressed to find a breed of dog that makes a mess of its den.


Messiness has been deemed variously a moral failing, a hallmark of laziness, a serious character flaw or a hard-wired human behavior. But one thing seems clear: the tendency for messiness shows up early in life and endures, leading some to believe that slobs are born, not made.

Of course infants and very young children are universal chaos machines. Messiness is just the natural state of all children until age 6 or so when they develop the requisite motor and behavioral skills to be able to impose order on their worlds, said Dr. Theodore Shapiro, professor of psychiatry at the New York Weill Cornell Center.

Children can defy their parents in limited ways, and making a mess is a good one, Dr. Shapiro said. Some children can't help making a mess, like those with attention deficit disorder. On the other hand, an orderly and compliant child might not be neat by nature but just wants to please his parents.

But for some, messiness is a resilient trait that's impervious to the environment.

My friend Pam, certain that she could make neatniks of her young children, devised a clever strategy. ''They had shoebox-size toy boxes into which I would sort their toys by type, with the type indicated by a Polaroid on the end showing what was supposed to be in that box: Legos, soldiers, crayons, tiny cars and trucks,'' she said.

''The idea was that the kids would learn to sort the inevitable mess in each box before they could read. Wrong. I spent hours on their floors, sorting, while they watched, with bewilderment and then increasing amusement as they got older.''

Contrary to popular belief, messiness is not necessarily a sign of mental disorganization. Who among us doesn't know a messy person who can instantly retrieve, from a bewildering stack of papers, exactly what he's looking for? As Freud supposedly said: ''Don't clean up the mess. I know exactly where everything is.''

Nor does messiness seem to preclude productivity: some of the most creative and prolific people are inveterate slobs. A reporter I know has to climb over towers of papers to reach his desk, but he can find the most obscure reference and has never missed a deadline.

A clue to the nature of messiness may lie in the fact that many messy people are unconcerned or unaware of the seeming chaos of their local environment. Perhaps messiness and neatness are just markers of a person's spatial awareness and orientation.

Like people with high pain thresholds who may not notice low-level pain, messy people may just not feel their space as keenly as neatniks.

Of course no one would deny that clutter can also be an effective psychological weapon. Just think of how Oscar, the archetypal slob of ''The Odd Couple,'' delights in torturing Felix -- the neat freak -- with a mess.


They may collect years' worth of useless things, like string, old newspapers, plastic bags and mail. Unable to discard anything, their space becomes a study in entropy.

A case in point is the eccentric and reclusive multimillionaire Howard Hughes, who suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. In the final years of his life, his cleaning rituals became so time-consuming that he could not sustain them, and he stopped washing and grooming altogether. Driven by relentless impulses to be clean, he paradoxically became so disheveled as to be unrecognizable.

What's fascinating is that humans appear to have no monopoly on repetitive compulsive behaviors; many animal species including dogs, cats and birds can be afflicted by these out-of-control rituals. Compulsive dogs, for example, can lick the fur and flesh right off their legs.

It's no stretch of the imagination to see that many compulsions represent grooming and cleaning behaviors run amok, and that they may even have conferred an evolutionary advantage, lower risk of infection. Likewise, hoarding may be a winning strategy when competing for limited resources.

But we don't live on the savanna any longer, and what once may have provided a survival edge is now at best a nuisance and at worst a disabling illness. The good news is that the compulsive repetitive behaviors of O.C.D. are treatable with behavior therapy and with antidepressants like Zoloft and Prozac; even compulsive dogs respond to Prozac. The best treatment for compulsive hoarding, though, is unclear.

Surprisingly, messiness can strike later in life, even in people who have lived as paragons of order. And when this happens, it is often an ominous sign.

Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, often announced by subtle personality and cognitive changes, can sometimes surface with neglect of one's environment. My grandmother, who was as constitutionally neat as you can get, became progressively uninterested in maintaining her house years before the diagnosis of dementia was made.

But for most of us, messiness is nothing more than a quirk of human nature -- often annoying, sometimes endearing and probably immutable.

Drawing (Sara Schwartz)