FASHION AND THE UNCONSCIOUS......
Brunner, $5.75
Edmund Bergler, M.D.
A check through the psychoanalytic literature reveals no book on CLOTHES AND FASHION since Flugel's work which is almost 25 years old. Quite surprising in view of the importance of this subject to the psychoanalyst.
Dr. Bergler fills this gap. His analysis of fashion designers led him to the extensive literature on fashion and clothes. As the result, he raised some provocative questions: Who invented clothes in the first place? Why? Decoration, modesty, protection? All three-but what do these mean to the wearer, to the observer and the designer? Modesty has been correlated with repressed exhibitionism; decoration with the long-forgotten custom of wearing of magical amulets. Protection? Not as long as the half-clad female is more alluring (to many men) than the nude.
"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that women have to alter it every six months," quipped Oscar Wilde. Who is responsible for the foolishness in fashion? The designers, to mention one group. Male homosexuals (who are inwardly terrified of women) are predominant in designing women's clothes. Whatever their rationalizations they hate women, as a defense. After analyzing over 100 male homosexuals, many of them connected with the fashion industry, Dr. Bergler reached the conclusion that unsuspecting women are victims of a fashion hoax perpetrated by the unconscious of some designers.
The author submits the thesis that clothes are a masculine invention (rather than a specifically feminine interest) secondarily thrust upon women to alleviate man's unconscious infantile fear, masochistically tinged, of the female body. It is the identical diffuse early infantile fear which increases to terror in the homosexual. Dr. Bergler discusses psychology of the latter in detail and clarifies the misconceptions centering around the homosexual's psychic makeup.
How about the typical male who is above this "fashion nonsense"? What is his attitude? The theory is suggested that feminine attire is man's unconscious reassurance against his own repressed fears, and the equally repressed fantasies connected with them: the magic of the intervening thin layer of material-the improved skin-seems to do the trick. Nevertheless, man-for whom the neckline plunges, for whom the skirts are shortened and swirled, who whistles (sometimes in thought) after every goodlooking girl-is not, as he believes, running after Lady Godiva. What he is frantically looking for is inner reassurance that he is THE HE-MAN. The interconnection between man's inner and deeply repressed masochistic fear and (used as an inner defense) his two pseudo-aggressive "transgressions into the forbidden" (peeping and mental undressing), lies at the crux of the matter.
What do women live out in their obsession with fashion? Are there sartorial "anti-talents" among them? Can "lack of taste" be defined? On the basis of Dr. Bergler's case histories, the thesis is presented that there are, sartorially speaking, no "tasteless" women, only neurotically inhibited ones. Dr. Bergler also investigates the unconsciously determined choice of color.
A separate chapter ("In Defense of Men") discusses unconscious tributaries to love and jealousy, and the connection with the misuse of clothes.
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