Psychological Aspects of Clothing

To discuss clothing as a feature of psychology is also to deal with the fundamental self. Freud's discussion of the ego is decisive in this regard, for it points up the manner in which the self is projected into the realm of what is distinctly the not-self, or Other, i.e., the everyday world.

Normally, there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self. . . . This ego appears to us as something autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from everything else. That such an appearance is deceptive, and that on the contrary the ego is continued inwards, without any sharp delimitation, into an unconscious mental entity which we designate as the id . . . should still have much more to tell us about the relation of the ego to the id. . . . There are cases in which parts of a person's own body, even portions of his own mental life . . . appear alien to him and as not belonging to his ego; there are other cases in which he ascribes to the external world things that clearly originate in his own ego and that ought to be acknowledged by it. Thus even the feeling of our own ego is subject to disturbances (Freud, 1962, pp. 12-13).

. . .
decoration, referring to clothing as an "Architectural Idea," or image of the self possessed both by the individual self and by the collective of selves commonly referred to as society. On this view there is always a social element to the most personal psychology of clothing decisions, or more exactly there is always a personal psychological component to clothing decisions that will be judged by society. For neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere Accident, but the hand is ever guided on by mysterious operations of the mind. . . . Body and the Cloth are the site and materials whereon and whereby his beautified edifice, of a Person, is to be built. . .. . The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is Decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilised countries (Carylyle, 1991, pp. 28-31). Clothing functions as a means of attempting to project an ideal image of self into the "Other" of the external world. "To choose clothes, either in a store or at home, is to define and describe ourselves," says Lurie (1981, p. 5). To the degree clothing functions not so much to define the self as to allow the self to cope with the world into which it has been projected, it can also be considered a
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Body Cloth, Utah Ohio, Woman Fashion, , According Freud, Elsewhere Barthes, Architectural Idea, Ancient Egypt, Indeed Laver, Sartor Resartus, clothes york, lurie 1981, functionality clothing, psychology clothing, barthes 1983, laver 1969, clothing functions, external world, wearing clothes, image self,
Approximate Word count = 1827
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Psychological Aspects of Clothing