FIXATIONS On the Trail to China : * Marvin Fogleman is always happy to run into a bull--or a steer or a cowboy or a horse--in a china shop, or anywhere else he looks for Western-themed dinnerware.

Somehow, sushi wouldn’t look right on these plates. And tofu would look mighty forlorn surrounded by designs of glowering longhorn steer, wild-riding cowpokes and branding irons.

But Marvin Fogleman doesn’t put much of anything on his cowboy-themed china. He has enough place settings of the stuff to serve a wagon train, but even his family doesn’t get to use it, except perhaps once a year during the holidays. Though the hardy dinnerware does lend itself to steaks and barbecue, Fogleman limits their menu to such items as hamburgers and beef stroganoff.

“I’ll only have foods where you don’t use a knife, because I don’t want those knife marks on my plates,” Fogleman explains.

Is this guy neurotic or what?

The answer is “or what,” it seems. Fogleman’s ‘40s and ‘50s place settings sell for more than $100 a plate nowadays, so it’s understandable if he doesn’t host many Greek weddings. And he has it from a good authority that he isn’t nuts: himself. When he’s not at home in Santa Ana gloating over his stagecoach-encrusted butter dishes, Fogleman maintains a psychotherapy practice in Fullerton.

Finally after months of the Fixations column, we’ve got a professional to define the term:

“In the psychology of collecting, a fixation is basically an arrested growth at a particular developmental stage for a child. So unconsciously the person goes back to that area that stopped in order now to get from people what they were not able to get when they were growing up. So the true collector is probably trying to relive something that was missed, and they repair it by the collections they acquire. They get a sense of mastery from it, and a sense of completeness.”

Applying that idea to himself, Fogleman continued: “Well, I grew up in a situation that was very deprived, in that my dad was an alcoholic and there was very little money. We ate on dinnerware that was mismatched, old Melmac and those kinds of things. So I have been able to acquire things that were not available to us when I was growing up. It’s a repair of the past.”

The 44-year-old Fogleman began shopping for his supperware 12 years ago, filling in gaps in several sets of china that had been passed on to him and his wife by a grandmother. He began to focus on collecting the cowboy china because his father had been a cowboy. (“Ach! Der father again!” we can all exclaim in Viennese accents.)

Though cowboying wasn’t exactly one of the big-growth professions of ‘50s, Fogleman explained, “(My father) grew up in Colorado and came out to California, and even when he lived in the Bay Area he’d rented pasture and had horses. When I grew up in Sacramento we had horses in the back yard.”

Now Fogleman has horses on cereal bowls. The china he collects has series names like Pioneer Trails, Longhorn, Rodeo and Boots and Saddles, all made by the now-defunct Wallace China Co. of Huntington Park. While there were other manufacturers, Wallace, commissioned by a firm called W.C. Wentz, originated the cowboy motif in 1943. Cowboy artist Till Gooden created many of the designs. Classed as “hotel-grade barbecue ware” the china, along with matching glassware (some with tooled leather holders) and paper napkins, was marketed by Wentz as the “Westward Ho!” line.

In addition to about 100 pieces of the cowboy-themed china, Fogleman’s personal collection includes 15 more genteel dinnerware sets, several displayed about his home, which is appointed in mid-century furnishings. He also has about 5,000 pieces of dinnerware for sale, through a mail-order business that rivals the income from his psychotherapy work.

He figures he searches through 50 thrift shops a week. The two 1950s Charles Eames chairs in his living room, valued at $500 each, were picked up in an Orange County thrift for 75 cents each. His wife, Pat, has an interest in costume jewelry, he said, but not nearly enough of one to usually accompany him on his junk-shop jaunts.

He’s gone as far afield as Portland, Ore., to antique meets looking for Western dinnerware, and for a while published a collector’s newsletter, called Westward Ho!, to help swap information and merchandise. It’s rare these days when he’s able to buy cowboy china from people who don’t know what they have. He was able, though, to buy 20 pieces from a “greasy spoon” cafe in Sacramento that was still using the dishes.

With the recent popularity of things Western, the plates he used to get for $10 now go for $100, and several pieces cost upward of $400. Some of the rarest items are the child’s plate, cereal bowl and mug from the Buckaroo series, scarce presumably because so many were broken by kids over the years. Fogleman’s rarest piece, worth about $500, is a salad serving bowl, suggesting that cowboys didn’t cotton much to roughage.

Fogleman doesn’t dispute that he’s addicted to his cowboy china.

“I think in a lot of ways it’s obsessive to get up at 4 in the morning and drive an hour to go through a swap meet when it’s 40 degrees, just because you want to be the first one to find a set of a particular dinnerware. To me that’s being driven . But to me it’s a positive addiction: It gives you two or three hours of walking exercise. And it’s like a treasure hunt. It gives you a sense of completeness to be able to know in some way that you’ve reassembled something that is no longer being made the way that it was 50 years ago.”