Nudism Redefined !

‘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.