The Seba library treats Nudity in 8 passages, across 6 authors (including Eliade, Mircea, Freud, Sigmund, David Konstan).
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 argues that baptismal nudity carries a dual ritual-metaphysical charge, simultaneously enacting the stripping of sin and the restoration of prelapsarian innocence.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis
When we look back at this unashamed period of childhood it seems to us a Paradise… Paradise itself is no more than a group phantasy of the childhood of the individual. That is why mankind were naked in Paradise and were without shame in one another’s presence.
Freud reads the paradise myth as a collective screen memory of infantile shamelessness, locating nudity at the origin of the psyche’s nostalgic relation to pre-cultural freedom.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900thesis
nudity has taken on various unusual meanings that can be mutually contradictory, and is ‘related on the one hand to the humiliation of being stripped, but on the other to the will to power and dominance.’
Konstan, citing Jacoby, identifies nudity’s constitutive ambivalence as both degradation and assertion of power, grounding its archetypal link to shame in the threat of uncontrolled sexual instinctuality.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006thesis
its typical form lies in a distressing feeling in the nature of shame, and the fact that one wishes to hide one’s nakedness, as a rule by movement, but finds one is unable to do so.
Freud establishes the canonical structure of the nakedness dream as a paradigmatic conflict between the wish to expose and the inhibiting force of shame.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900thesis
The progressive concealment of the body which goes along with civilization keeps sexual curiosity awake. This curiosity seeks to complete the sexual object by revealing its hidden parts.
Freud presents the concealment of nudity as civilization’s paradoxical engine of desire, arguing that covering generates the very curiosity it ostensibly suppresses.
, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905supporting
Cover-up is essential to priapic arousal. Soft core, because it invites fantasy beyond what is shown, is more priapic than hard core.
Hillman argues that concealment of nudity is not repression but a structurally necessary condition for priapic desire, inverting the Freudian model of civilization suppressing instinct.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
Because of its nudity and stellar nature, this card also brings to mind Venus, the shepherd’s star, the most brilliant of the stars that allow us to get our bearings at night.
Jodorowsky links the Star card’s nudity to the Venusian principle of natural transparency and cosmic orientation, reading unclothed embodiment as symbolic of alignment with nature.
, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004supporting
The bathroom is a room full of strong imagery and psychological content—bodily waste, cleansing, privacy, cosmetics, clothing, nudity, pipes connected to the underground, and running water.
Moore catalogues nudity as one among several psychologically charged elements of the domestic bathroom, situating it within the poetics of everyday soul-making.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992aside