You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The main body of this book is concerned with an analysis of our past and present attitude to clothes. But in the last four chapters Dr. Flügel discusses the change in this attitude which will result when it is better understood. The work thus falls into two parts, which may be described respectively as the pure and the applied psychology of clothes. Although it contains much which is not strictly psycho-analytical, it could only have been written by a psycho-analyst, and it might legitimately claim to have opened a new department of this science. Thus its inclusion in the Psycho-Analytical Library is fully justified.
Dr. Flügel first discusses the fundamental motives of decoration, modesty and protection. He points out that clothes are essentially a compromise which satisfies the conflicting demands of decoration and modesty. Thus, for example, modesty requires the repression of phallic exhibitionism, but the repressed motive is satisfied symbolically in the decoration of a top hat. Grades in the displacement of exhibitionism from the phallus are illustrated by the codpiece, the poulaine or phallic shoe and the modern shoe in which comfort is still sacrified to pointedness (pp. 27–28).
Dr. Flügel analyses any given instance of modesty in terms of five variables. The inhibitory impulse, he says, may be directed primarily against social or sexual forms of display, against the tendency to display the naked body or against the tendency to display gorgeous clothes, against display in the self or against display in others, against desire or against disgust, and it may relate to various parts of the body (p. 54).
Besides offering protection against cold and heat, human or animal foes, and against accident, clothes have also been used as a protection against psychological dangers. Of these the most obvious are magic and spirits, and phallic symbols of various kinds have often been worn as a protection against them. But Dr. Flügel points out that clothes have also bee