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Some women patients are sullen, negativistic and assaultive when clothed, but these same patients are submissive and cooperative when nude. Nudity may represent a regression to a more pleasant period of personality adjustment. The harshness of one's unconscious and the rigidity of one's super-ego may impose on a person unnecessary restrictions with a consequent loss of both enjoyment and efficiency. The moral symbolism of clothes may partake strongly of these restrictions.
The most primitive type of person, from the point of view of clothes psychology, is the rebellious type. The primitive interest attached to the naked body later becomes displaced onto clothes; in these people the displacement is meager. The sheltering but often hampering love of the mother is regarded theoretically as the basis for one's attitude toward other types of shelter; in certain cases the individual seems to wish to get away from this. In women the libido is said to be diffuse and the whole body sexualized; this may make it difficult for women to sublimate their exhibitionism from body to clothes.
According to Freudian theory, original human nature includes an instinctive tendency to exhibitionism which, in its primary form, displays itself in acts of immodest exposure, and which has various derivative forms, such as demanding attention in the presence of others, being noisy and silly when strangers are about, and showing excitement when under observation. W. S. Taylor states that exhibitionism is not always derived from sex behavior, and that anger is as likely as love to be its emotional reinforcement. Nudists claim that the increased pleasures of exhibitionism and of skin and muscle eroticism derived from exposure of the body to the sun and warm air drain off a certain quantity of sexual energy, which might have taken a purely sexual channel. They conclude that nakedness is a potent method of reducing immorality.
The first two cases here described represent the rebellious type of nudity i