Sigmund Freud cared little for music. He also said he didn’t understand “oceanic feelings,” that connection to something greater than the self that can provide feelings of euphoria. As close as this might sound to his ideas about the unconscious, the unconscious was at best unsettling, when it wasn’t a disturbing challenge to our egos, inducing all manner of horror and denial.
We don’t easily feel connected to all humanity in the Freudian universe. What could this reassuring interconnectedness be aside from an illusion? Annoying… just like music apparently. Oh Freud!
I think I could probably add fashion to the list of Freudian faux pas with some confidence. The fetishistic value of clothing—especially shoes, undergarments, and accessories—appears starkly in his groundbreaking 1927 essay “Fetishism.” Clothing is one of our strange inventions for dealing with the problem of genitals, especially female ones. It conceals what is shameful about bodies—as decided by culture—and in concealing it induces a desperation to see what no one wants to see. Clothing becomes a conduit for so many repressed feelings, positive and negative, and a way to try them all out.
I’ve always appreciated the speed of fashion. It is the art form most closely tied to the production of consumer goods, holding in tension old-world methods of making things and the hypermodern churning out of objects. What might be utilitarian about dressing ourselves—like being given a uniform—quickly moves into fanciful excess. Fashion surpasses any idea of utility: foot-binding, high heels, corsets. A way of throwing off nature.
Walter Benjamin explored this sentiment in his unfinished Arcades Project: “In every fashion, perversities are suggested by the most ruthless means. Every fashion stands in opposition to the organic. Every fashion couples the living body to the inorganic world.”
Benjamin sees death everywhere in fashion. He calls it a “motley cadaver,” “the provocation of death through the woman,” “decay whispered between shrill, jesting bursts of laughter.” Hanging around at this juncture between nature and culture, body and technology, Benjamin finds that age-old Freudian prohibition against incest embodied in the seamless anti-aphrodisiac that is our parents’ sense of dress—yuck! Hence the ever-present, urgent need to find or invent a new style for oneself, one that announces a new generation, and therefore the death of an older one. All the while, one imagines oneself somehow defying death, fashion a kind of armor against mortality.
With my colleague, the psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici, we wrote and lectured on fashion and melancholia, homing in on the tragic life of Alexander McQueen. Unlike fashion’s manic forwardness, McQueen didn’t want to outlive his mother, following her to the grave by taking his own life shortly after she died. More than perhaps any other designer, McQueen put death on display: Kate Moss as an other-worldly angelic hologram, runways like garbage heaps, the skull as his calling card. Psychoanalysis built itself upon the idea of the mother as the primal lost object that we seek to re-find, again and again. Fashion must bear some relationship to this lost object. How else could we stand in front of an overflowing closet and exclaim: “I have nothing to wear.”
Recently in The New Yorker, Leslie Jamison wrote about Valerie Steele’s book Dress, Dream and Desire and its accompanying exhibition at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She notes that while psychoanalytic thought has often been antagonistic toward fashion, it has also been quick to predictably over-analyze it. And fashion, for its part, has continually played with psychoanalytic themes to great aplomb: bisexuality, vanitas, dreams, surrealism, self-invention, castration, the enigmatic feminine.
Jamison lands somewhere more quotidian and perhaps more pleasurable. “A garment,” she writes, “invites us to invent a self that has never existed, and then, when we take it off, to kill that provisional self—to keep shape-shifting with giddy abandon, a spirit of play and possibility born of faith in the eternal redo of the next morning, the next outfit, the next self.”
Which brings me, by a route that now seems almost embarrassingly overdetermined, to Bella Freud. Her popular podcast Fashion Neurosis puts cultural figures on a proverbial couch and begins, naturally enough, with what they are wearing. Freud, a fashion designer, is part of a lineage that includes not only Sigmund but the other great Freud, her father Lucian: one Freud preoccupied with what clothes conceal, another with the naked body, and Bella with what happens when we dress it.
She recently told an incredible anecdote—a joke, really—on the podcast about her father being asked if he knew about the great Freud (pronounced at that time as “Frood”), to which Lucian replied: “Grapefruit? Yes, I know about them.” He’s forever the grapefruit for me now.
Bella brings her experience as an analysand—I did not ask her to disclose for how long—to her interviews, alongside her long history of careful, whimsical clothing design and her sense of what clothing can mean for us—about us—as a conduit for intimacy throughout our lives.
I wanted to start with the fact that on your podcast, Fashion Neurosis, everybody is lying down. And in many, many interviews, often at the very end, they comment on how interesting it is to speak lying down. My whole profession is based on this strange idea, and it’s so amazing to see it.
Does everyone lie down when they come and see you?
Not everyone. And everyone always asks why they sit up or why they don’t lie down. But you try to make the lying down an important transition point.
Having now tried it, I really see that it’s completely different. I never lie down with my analyst, Adam [Phillips]. When I did that lying down with Laurie Anderson [on a live episode of Fashion Neurosis] it was as though I was in a different universe. I felt like I had no filter. It’s a bit late to start lying down now… Adam’s retiring in three months.
I want to ask you about that soon. But it is interesting, isn’t it? I mean, there’s obviously the associations with sleep, with bedrooms. But it’s just a couch. And yet it makes an extraordinary differentiation between what we’re all doing, all day long, which is sitting, and in this, extreme dialogic way, talking, taking each other, face to face.
When lying down, your thinking comes from where your chest and heart are, not your head. Almost immediately it changes. I really didn’t know that when I started [the podcast] because never having done it, I just thought, I need a shape. I need a prop. I’m going to do this embarrassing thing of cribbing from the ancestor. It was done as a slightly jokey thing. But it doesn’t feel like that now.
It allows me to sit back, and I imagine it allows you to do that because you do such a nice job letting them just speak, drift, go. You have a certain way of joining the person gently, and it’s what makes the interviews really distinct.
When I was sort of figuring it out, I thought I’d be mostly talking to fashion people. And I thought, Well, I’ve got lots of stories. I want to be part of this. I didn’t want it to be pretending it was therapy. But then it sort of just came out quite naturally. I didn’t plan it as such. I didn’t want to be too weirdly forensic. I feel very engaged, so involved in what people say. And with them lying down, I feel kind of protective.
It’s something the field doesn’t talk about, or perhaps talk about all that well. But the mutual gazing can put you in a kind of intensity, a potentially combative and reactive position. To be able to sit back, it’s not to not be with the person, but in fact to be with them more.
This designer who is quite kind of cautious and guarded said, “I can’t get any cues from you because I can’t see your eyes or your lips,” and then he went on and talked quite a lot. It was a great interview. Sometimes people tell me, “You know, I can’t tell when I should be stopping.” I hadn’t realized I had created that confusion, but it worked out.
Psychoanalysis boot camp for you. I love that. In the orthodoxies and institutions of psychoanalysis, and over 100 years of it, we lost that it’s supposed to be something that’s just invented by each person from the ground up. If you look at the early days of psychoanalysis, Freud was like, “Do whatever. Go figure it out.”
You hear these stories of rigidity, and it’s true that it doesn’t make any sense. I suppose that [exists] in every professional area. But when you go to an analyst and you’re so prepared to be exposed, and [then] somebody has weird, strange protocols… I still don’t get the Lacanian thing of cutting sessions after five minutes; that seems like a horrible idea.
The idea, interestingly, is a clothing metaphor that I quite like. I just don’t know if the way it’s practiced lives up to what he wanted. He thought that you stop the session in an important place so that it stitches to the next session. It’s not just like a 45-minute standard block of time. So that when you come to a point that feels remarkable, you stop, and then you pick it up again. That’s why it’s not five minutes—it’s supposed to be 60 minutes, five minutes, 20 minutes. Lacan had a lot of clothing metaphors actually. He was a dandy, he ran around town trying to find certain precious fabrics, animal skins. He was obsessed with his clothing.
You always begin with the question about what someone was wearing and what they thought about as they got dressed. You also have some other questions that you repeat.
I have two that I always ask. The first one is, “What did you have for breakfast?” I thought it was an un-self-conscious place for us to start. And then, “If you fancy someone and don’t like what they’re wearing, does it kill your attraction?” That comes later. It depends on the person where it comes in. Sometimes it’s right at the end. Then there are other questions, like, “Was there something that you were obsessed with in your childhood?” It seemed like a good way into how someone thought about themselves as a child, because often it’s so much to do with a garment.
You cover the here and now, then childhood memory, then pleasure and disgust in relation to eroticism. Disgust is a telltale sign; you can’t get away from it once it’s there. Freud talked about disgust during latency, with school-age kids. You have all this Oedipal yumminess and eroticism, and then in the latency stage, they need to get out of it. Everything becomes disgusting and a joke, like, “Ewwww, they’re kissing, ewwww poop.”
Yes, I read about that in my Freud comic book. I find with all these dense subjects, that it’s great to read about them in comic book form.
Absolutely. There’s Darian Leader’s comic book about Lacan and Alison Bechdel on Winnicott. I wanted to ask about your long analysis with Adam Phillips and your desire to do the podcast. Being on the other side of the proverbial couch now, did that feel like a big transition to you?
Not at all, because it doesn’t feel like that. There’s no part of me that feels like it’s therapy. It’s almost a sort of a performance. Because of everything that I’ve learned from Adam, I suppose I’ve learned I don’t have to have any answers. If I can just shape my questions, in a particular way, it’s almost like having a heating system: It just does its thing.
Someone could certainly have a lot of experience as an interviewer, like a Joan Didion or Janet Malcolm, but there is something about having been in analysis. Every analyst has to be in analysis. And I think at the very least we have to learn how not to control the conversation. That we don’t want to get answers. You must know that you don’t have an answer. The answers will come.
Not trying to get something from someone felt very clear to me right at the start. Sometimes people say, “How do you get people to be so open?” But as Adam might say, I don’t do anything. I’m quite open as well, and all my research comes from things that I’ve read that people have said.
You talked a lot about how you went to analysis when you knew that your father was ill. And Adam’s retiring, as you mentioned. There’s something very beautiful about this show poised between your experience of going to analysis to deal with your father’s passing, bringing some of it to the public in a way, and knowing that this long analysis is ending, not by your own volition.
I try not to think about it. When Adam or I go on holiday, I don’t speak to him and it’s quite easy to get used to not speaking to him. Then as soon as I see him again, it’s just so rich, richer every time. When my father died, I was wondering what his parting gift would be. I was worried that I would fall apart, but I also had this slight idea that maybe I would, you know, fly up, that it would be freeing in a way. The preparation really helped that to happen. And I know this is obvious, but Adam’s still there when we stop. It’s a different kind of disappearing act, as it were, because I know that he is still there and he’s made me able to live without him.
I interviewed Adam for the last book, The Life You Want, at the 92Y and for CULTURED. He said, “I just want to stop with some dignity. And for my patients, because a lot of analysts go on and on and expose their patients to the incredible volatility of aging.” I thought it was so kind.
That’s one of the good things about him—he has this incredible kindness and he is rigorous too. So it’s much more trustworthy, the kindness, because you know that it comes from rigor.
I think your fashion is both of those things. You have a strictness but you also have a whimsy. Walter Benjamin talked about fashion as a way of getting away from your parents. I love the idea that the best anti-aphrodisiac is your parents’ fashion, which I thought about, obviously, because of your question about disgust and your lineage. I wonder how you think of fashion and questions about the body—dressing, undressing.
God. We didn’t live with my father or anything, and my mother was very young and dressed like a hippie—she looked cool, you know, but she attracted so much unwelcome attention from looking so different. I just wished my mom had brown curly hair and a trouser suit. When I left home, I got into punk rock. That really worked well because it was so aggressive and anti anything hippie. I remember Johnny Rotten saying this brilliant thing that hippies are complacent, and I thought, Yeah, they really are. I’ve had direct experience of that. The other thing was that clothes really helped me deal with body hatred—I had tons. It was a way of making myself look slightly different from how I thought that I was, to change what I thought people saw. It’s a way of finding out things that you can live with or not.
It makes me think that early on, you think that it does change how the other person sees you. Maybe it’s just changing how you see yourself.
It’s definitely a mysterious mirror that I thought I was putting up. If people say, “Oh, I like what you’re wearing,” it’s like you’re hidden within that. The wearing is making things better than they are. It’s a way of kind of having distance and deciding how close you want to get. Adam often talks about my distance regulator; I see all these places that my fault-finding is doing that, regulating distance.
This reminds me of a recurring nightmare you spoke about where you have to move a million pins in a carriage from one compartment to another. You had this as a child, but the pins are so important in tailoring. It’s almost prophetic. With the distance regulation, I thought of you saying you have a million self-criticisms, like with the bodily shame.
I don’t know how to analyze the pins. I still can feel the feeling of like, Well, how do I even touch them? Because I can’t even try and show that I’m doing my best, even though it’s an impossible task.
In the episode, Laurie Anderson made this fantastic joke about it being pointless. I think our most difficult experience is that it’s meaningless chaos.
And that’s just time. It’s like a weight on one side of your head, that this dream is still reverberating. To hear everything’s fine when you feel like it’s not fine, that is the worst thing ever. The relief is partly to do with placing this sense of menace somewhere, where it stopped being menacing. And generally, Adam can create this atmosphere that I can consider a comfort, which is probably something I’ve been wary of. I don’t trust that I can ever get it. I go very kind of abandoned and small when I feel like I need comfort because I think, I can’t have that. I don’t want that. There is only one way and it’s stoicism. You cannot need help because who can help you with this scenario?
You spoke about getting dressed up for Adam in the beginning and taking hours, I think this was with Hanif Kureishi. It brought me back to my first analysis when I was 19. Sometimes I’d show up with the craziest outfits, like I had to try on my confusion. I’d get there and I’d think, Oh my God, what am I wearing? At one point, my analyst said, “Do you have any problems with what I wear?” I was mortified. I did have thoughts about his socks—he wore silly socks. Why does he wear these socks?! I had to say that out loud. It was terrible but also beautiful to have that experience.
It was really nice [getting dressed for Adam], even though I knew it was sort of absurd. I’d rather it was that, than something where I didn’t give a shit because I didn’t care enough about that person. I always cared about what Adam would say or think, but I would still be able to be completely open and tell him everything. I’ve always found I had lots of compartments of how much I can and can’t tell someone. I thought, I’ve got to practice being as open and direct as I can be with someone who is so attractive. I need to practice that with a man who is attractive, not someone who isn’t.
Transference is a silly word because it’s so misunderstood. The idea that you are bringing something old onto someone where it doesn’t belong there, and then you accuse them of things that they didn’t do. And then you should get it straight. It’s not that. It’s the question of this intimacy and what it enables.
It is all to do with intimacy and what’s so great about analysis is when all those things are there. You can have all this closeness and these fantasies and God knows what, but none of it has to happen. That’s such a pleasure. It also is an education: You can get close to people, but you don’t have to go to the edge all the time.
In that vein, what has surprised you in your interviews with this intimacy that you create?
Maybe it’s that you can get really close to someone in an hour and it’s a completely fabricated situation. You can feel all these great things and then they can leave and you don’t have to become friends even. I have had this amazing, intense sort of closeness with people, then we just go about our lives. And each one is different, so it doesn’t feel formulaic. I spend an awful lot of time preparing. I want to be as in their world as I can be when we’re together.
This is so moving listening to you reflect on this whole process, because it’s like, without understanding it, you have reinvented psychoanalysis. Obviously, it’s part of your lineage; that doesn’t necessarily need to be known. But it’s felt.
Your sensitivity to the body and to forms, to the ways in which one uses these to hide or to reveal or to get closer or to distance comes through in the interviews. I was particularly moved by the interview with Charlotte Gainsbourg. You always think of her jeans and then she said, “I’m still trying to find the perfect pair of jeans. I guess I’m looking for my body and I can’t find it.” She’s tried on jeans for a lifetime and you immediately connect to your own feelings about that. This is what’s so powerful about fashion. These universal questions are touched by the way that we’re all trying to survive really.
I said, “Oh, you have this great, sexy, messy hair,” and Charlotte sat up and went, “I hate my hair.” She couldn’t accept it. I thought, Oh, I know that so well. And there you are, this sort of ravishing beauty, so complex and [full of] so much suffering, really. She’s one of the people that particularly stayed with me.
I think a lot of your compliments, which I think any listener would immediately identify with; they’re not superficial.
The other day I was like, “Oh God, I must stop paying compliments.” Because sometimes it can fall into a silence or something. I say them, and then usually they’re like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
They’re very powerful moments in terms of this complicated mirror that we put up where we can’t see ourselves or we’ve created something that we want the other to see, but that is unbearable to us. There was a really funny article in The New York Times about Gen Zers dressing like they’ve never worn clothes before. I wonder what the future of fashion is. Do you have any thoughts?
Fashion is never going to go away because we don’t want it to, but it’s harder now for the last 30 or 40 years since ready-to-wear was invented. All these shops are closing down and to make fashion, and make it available to people, is harder and harder. In a way there are no conventions, you can sort of really wear anything. You don’t have to wear a suit to work or this or that. It seems like a lot of people are wearing gym-type stuff, which should be really sexy and is weirdly sexless. It’s like a light switch went off rather than on. It’s the opposite of what you think with clothes that suggest that a person is fascinating. My son is Gen Z; they just wear anything really. The thing about fashion that’s good and bad is that it changes, so it doesn’t matter how good something you make is. It won’t necessarily be accepted if that’s not what people want at that moment. And it keeps going.
Forever. Well, I’m one of those analysts that stops immediately on time. So it’s time.
For further study…
- Thomas Morton on Gen Z dressing
- Leslie Jamison on the psychology of fashion
- Patricia Gherovici and me on dressing up the death drive
- Roman Polanski’s “A Therapy” short for Prada
- Paul Holdengraber with Judith Clark and Adam Phillips on their book, The Concise Dictionary of Dress
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