FREUDIAN SLIPS

The psychology of fashion.

- BY LESLIE JAMISON

The historian Valerie Steele argues that garments offer glimpses of the unconscious.

In “Fashion and the Unconscious,” a book from 1953, the psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler describes a patient in her mid-thirties who wore so much gray clothing that her friends called her the Lady in Gray. When Bergler asked the woman why she dressed this way, she said simply, “I like it”—the kind of reply that, to a mid-century analyst, dangled like a red flag before a bull. Eventually, Bergler tells us, he excavated the unconscious motive for her gray attire: beginning in her late teens, the woman had spent six years composing music and devising ballets, but she gave up when the work on which she'd pinned her highest hopes—a tragedy about moths attracted to a great, beautiful light, who all end up burned to death—was rejected. Bergler grew convinced that, after her artistic dreams were thwarted, she'd begun to identify as one of these burned moths. “Aren't moths—gray?” he asks her. He then triumphantly reports, “The patient did not answer.”