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You'll be surprised! And the You refers to everybody likely to read this book: the wearer of clothes (and that of course means really everybody), the historian of costume, those who design, make and sell clothes, the psychologist, and to a lesser extent even the psychoanalyst. The last named will be less astonished, because Dr. Bergler deals with unconscious motives, and the psychoanalyst already knows that, in Dr. Bergler's words, 'an element of "improbability" is one which is common to all theories concerning the unconscious'. Nevertheless even he will probably be somewhat surprised (and all the more interested), for, as Dr. Bergler points out, analysts have devoted comparatively little attention to clothes and fashion. Though there have of course been a number of articles on special points, such as fetishism (and how little we really know about that), there has, it appears, been only one 'full dress' attempt to deal with the subject by an analyst, in a book published some twenty-five years ago; and as regards even that, at least one (friendly) reviewer felt it necessary to say something by way of justifying its appearance in a 'Psychoanalytical Library'.
The stimulus to Dr. Bergler's new attempt seems to have come from the fact that he had occasion to analyze a considerable number