Naked

if one dreams that clothes are removed and one is naked, it can mean that the naked, essential psyche is being brought into visibility. The whole symbolism of taking off and putting on clothes is a common theme

Edinger argues that dream-nakedness signifies the alchemical process of putrefaction and the extraction of the soul, bringing the essential psyche into visibility beneath the layers of persona and incarnated conditioning.

Edinger, Edward F., The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995thesis

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Baptismal nudity too bears a meaning that is at once ritual and metaphysical. It is abandoning ‘the old garment of corruption and sin’ … but it is also return to primitive innocence, to Adam’s state before the fall.

Eliade interprets ritual nakedness as a simultaneously metaphysical and initiatory act—the abandonment of the garments of sin and a recovery of Adamic innocence prior to shame.

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis

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When we look back at this unashamed period of childhood to us a Paradise; and Paradise itself is no more than a group fantasy of the childhood of the individual. That is why mankind were adise and were without shame in one another’s presence

Freud identifies the dream of naked, shameless childhood with the psychic fantasy of Paradise, establishing the developmental and mythic roots of the nakedness motif in the dream-life of neurotics and normals alike.

Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900thesis

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‘naked Truth’ is not beyond any barrier, not beyond the realm of human experience … It is the immanent depth of human experience. Instead of having to leave for some impossibly distant place, we have to penetrate

Giegerich deploys ‘naked Truth’ as an epistemological category denoting the immanent depth of soul-experience, refusing to locate it in a transcendent beyond and insisting it is accessible through penetration into the given.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis

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In returning the clothes of her conditioning, the dreamer is able to discover, to see ‘for the first time,’ the real nature of her body’s beauty, which is that it is ‘radiant and full of love.’

Vaughan-Lee reads the dream-act of removing the garments of conditioning as a Sufi-inflected analogue to Edinger’s putrefactio—an unveiling that reveals the body’s beauty as a direct expression of connection to the Self.

Vaughan-Lee, Llewellyn, Catching the Thread: Sufism, Dreamwork, and Jungian Psychology, 1992supporting

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In the beginning, Adam and Eve enjoy life in the Garden, although they wouldn’t know it unless and until they experienced ‘evil’

Peterson frames the Edenic condition—implicitly one of nakedness before the fall—as a state of unconscious enjoyment that only becomes legible retrospectively through the advent of consciousness and the knowledge of evil.

Peterson, Cody, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024supporting

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Francis appears quite deliberately to be compelling the friars to inhabit the fringes and interstices of the social structure of his time, and to keep them in a permanently liminal state

Turner’s analysis of Franciscan permanent liminality implicitly frames the stripping of social markers—poverty as a kind of structural nakedness—as the optimal condition for the realization of communitas.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting

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Cover-up is essential to priapic arousal. Soft core, because it invites fantasy beyond what

Hillman notes, in passing, that concealment and nakedness exist in constitutive tension within priapic symbolism—the fig leaf belongs essentially with what it covers, making full exposure paradoxically deflating rather than revelatory.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007aside

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Actaion’s voyeurism and his hunting cannot be considered two separate alternatives. They are one and the same. How is his coming across Artemis to be understood?

Giegerich’s reading of Actaion’s encounter with the naked Artemis treats the moment of beholding as identical with the hunter’s essential telos—seeing the goddess unclothed is not a deviation but the very fulfillment of what the myth enacts.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020aside

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