The purpose of this research is to examine the implications of the distinction between body and body image for a theory of clothes and fashion as an ego defense. The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms important concepts of ego and fashion, and then to examine the concepts of body, and body image as intrinsic theoretical constituents and as constituents that can be specifically connected and distinguished. Once these basic concepts have been set forth, the research will explore the role of clothing and trends in fashion in affecting psychological patterns, perceptions, and enactments predicated of body and body image that might be discerned as a way of defending an ego that its owner may believe is in peril. In this regard, the connection between the psychology of the ego and the manipulation of such tangible goods as clothing in the service of the body as a projection or protection of the ego will be described.
To achieve these objectives, it will be useful to first examine the psychological concept of the ego. Freud's familiar definition of ego is instructive for the instant case because he draws a distinction between the (unconscious) perception of ego and what its reality might actually be. This may be compared to the difference between the reality of a body's makeup and what will be referred to hereafter as body image.
Normally, there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, of our own ego. 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 and for which it serves as a kind of facade--this was a discovery first made by psycho-analytic research, which should still have much more to tell us about the relation of the ego to the id. But tow...