ards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. . . . There are cases in which parts of a person's own body, even portions of his own mental life--his perceptions, thoughts and feelings--, 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 and the boundaries of the ego are not constant.
The ego's role as the agent of the facade appears central to the exploration of clothing and fashion as similar agents of ego defense vis-?-vis the perception and reality of body. Indeed, Freud's very elaboration of the ego as a kind of entity suggests how intimate the connection between the ego and elements (e.g., the body itself) that exist both physically and psychically close to it can be. Further, the fact that the ego may assert an otherness to perceptions of its own suggests that various projections or for that matter perceptions of that element of otherness, such as body or indeed as fashion or clothing, may be an index of psychopathology. On the other hand, to the degree the culture of fashion itself makes a claim to the observance of the individual, could not the culture itself be deemed somehow pathological? On that view, could not any defense mechanism of the ego on its own behalf be seen as a defense against the pathology of the culture? These are disturbing questions that Freud does not particularly ask, but they are implicit in various commentaries on the connection between self and self-image on one hand, and between self and the environment on the other.
The ego is a subject that has engaged a variety of commentators on body, body image, selfhood, psychology, fashion, clothing. As we shall see, the culture as a whole also becomes an element of commentary on the manner in w...