The Psychology of Nudism*

Some of you may have received a questionnaire a few months ago. It was sent to psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists and medical men for the purpose of ascertaining their opinion and attitude on nudism. With your permission, I shall attempt to present my answers to this questionnaire.

The aim of the advocates of nudism seems to be, to try to prove the validity of the nudistic movement by implying that the beneficial effects of open air and the sun's rays on the nude body, are confirmed by medical men and that psychiatrists support nudism for its therapeutic value in nervous states. Primarily they believe that group nudism without discrimination will be most effective in the education of children as a preventive of many difficulties connected with sexuality.

It is not at all surprising that at the present when the structure of social life and it morals is undergoing such rapid changes, and when sexual matters are treated so much more freely than they were a few years ago, such a movement should come into existence, particularly because the approach to the question of sexuality is frequently incorrect.

In approaching the subject from the psychoanalytical point of view, I shall try to present its obvious manifestations and draw conclusions from them to the hidden unconscious forces, supporting my deductions by clinical material.

It is evident that in our social life the attitude of sexual education for the young is frequently derived from the sexual problems of the adult which he unconsciously projects in his educational methods. Special considerations which are of actual importance in the sexual problems of the child are overlooked and neglected, even though we are aware that the sexual problems of the adult are entirely different from those of the child. The “sexual reality” of the adult is a world apart from the sexual aim of the child, and our clinical experience tells us that no matter how free the atmosphere in which