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11:08
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‘The psychologyof nakedness’ was a huge hit! The blog
post went viral on internet, and for the first time ever I had more than 1000
visitors reading a post in a single day. It was even shared on many online
platforms including ‘naturist’ websites like naturist-corner.com and homeclothsfree.com. I was appreciated by my fellow readers for my
bold style of explanation and for providing a Freudian reason behind the desire
to be naked, and the pleasure it endows. However, there were a couple of
critics who completely disagreed with me on the ground that they’re not
Freudians, and that they don’t judge the world from a psychoanalytical
perspective. I chose to write this post to illustrate that desire to be naked
is not something that can only be accounted for from a Freudian perspective. Even
a person who denies the concept of id, ego, and superego can have ample reason to
believe in the fact that there’s a nudist in each one of us!
‘There’s a nudist in each
one of us’, I said to a lady on an online psychology forum. ‘Oh really’, she replied,
‘ I am currently wearing a thick sweater, long sleeved top and jeans; still
considering turning the central heating back on! Here in the Scottish Borders
with stiff winds blowing from the North Sea outside my front door, nudity will
never catch on!” Contrastingly, at the tropics, the situation was quite the
opposite. I was wearing just an underwear and feeling overwhelmed in the
intense summer heat. It's so hot that I felt like being fully nude and impulsively
jumping into a pool of ice-cold water. I couln’t keep this thought for long
within me and finally fired it at her, listening to which she went nuts ! ‘I don’t bother about the nakedness of others.’, she said, ‘I think you’re nothing but a psychology freak
who's biased to look at every single thing in this world from a Freudian
perspective and try to account for it.’
Yes I was
looking at nudity from a Freudian perspective, and questioning whether being
nude is an unconscious human desire or not! In my blog post, I had reasoned out
that the unconscious desire of being naked gets expressed in the form of
activities like going to beach, becoming a naturist, or even wearing revealing
clothes, the ego defense mechanisms like sublimation being responsible for it.
But now I was confronting a ‘not-so-Freudian’ lady who kept on challenging my
explanation, forcing me to construct a different mode of justification. I
started looking for another mode and was inflamed with excitement when I came
across something called ‘Behavioristic perspective’ of psychology!
We all want to stay naked
all the times because of our cognitive tendency of ‘learning’ that involves ‘classical
conditioning’ and ‘operand conditioning’.(Now don’t accuse me of being a
Freudian here). These two modes of learning are the concepts of behavioral psychology
that follow quite a different path from that of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic
theory. Classical conditioning is a learning process that involves associations
between an environmental stimulus and a naturally occurring stimulus, where a
conditioned response is evoked even in the absence of original stimulus. In Pavlov's classic experiment with dogs, the neutral stimulus was the
sound of a bell and the naturally occurring reaction was salivation in response
to food. By associating the sound of the bell with the environmental stimulus
(the presentation of food), the sound alone could produce the salivation
response in dog. (Also, through a process called generalization, the dog
was conditioned to salivate at any sound that resembled the sound of bell. )
On the other hand, Operant
conditioning (or instrumental conditioning) is a method of learning that occurs
through positive reinforcement and punishments for behavior. A behavior that leads to a pleasurable
emotional state is likely to be repeated again and again, and a behavior that
leads to negative experiences is avoided. Consider
the case of a girl who gets a lot of compliment and attention for her legs one day when she wears a sexy miniskirt. The
compliments act as a positive reinforcement that would cause her to wear
miniskirts or other leg-revealing cloths more often from then on. (The response I got for ‘psychology of nakedness’ was a positive reinforcement that made me write another nudist
article). Thus, Judging the issue from a behavioristic
perspective, we can say that being naked is something associated with sex (classical
conditioning), and sex is usually a pleasurable experience. Anything that is
pleasurable is likely to be experienced more often (operand conditioning)...and
that applies to being nude too. In short, we humans are to conditioned to feel good in our birthday suit!
But then, if the above
mentioned justification is a universal psychological trend, why only few people
choose to become nudists? Well, the main reason behind it is that there is
always something called ‘social conditioning’ (the codes of ethics) that tend
to dominate over other two type of conditioning in this context. For the people
becoming nudists, social conditioning is not so dominant and their situation is
favorable enough to have them enjoy their nudity without causing troubles in others’s
life. We enjoy being naked under the shower. Don't we?. That’s a favorable
situation for us to enjoy our nudity without causing problem in other’s life.
Just pitch out nude from the bathroom and run up and down the house; you will
freak your fellow family members out! In a nudist community, nobody would freak
out at the naked bodies of others.
Listening to my
explanation, the lady expressed a feeling of understanding. She said, "your
words remind me that as a child I thought that it would be wonderful to be a
grownup, so that I would be able to walk around in house with no clothes on! I
remember that thought recurring over and over again - being in my own home
would mean that I could be naked”
I could understand what
she wanted to convey. The fantasies of childhood can be pretty embarrassing
when looked upon later in life, but at the same time reminds us of our true
humanly nature... As I child I used to seek moments when my parents would go
out, so that I can strip naked and feel comfortable in my own skin. That’s true of every human being. It takes to be much open-minded
to fully accept it, and admit it to others.
