What’s in Your Suitcase? Clothes, Compulsive Shopping and Packing Communicate the Unspeakable

The use of clothes, both worn and unworn, are forms of self-representation – a second skin – a bridge between internal and external – and can illustrate how inner life and externality can feel either connected or disconnected, revealing or concealing self-expression and embodied subjectivity. Clothes protect and express one’s deepest vulnerability and fears and play a crucial role in self-continuity and containment – blurring the distinction between body and mind. Analysts can discover a patient’s self and body-states that can be dissociated through attending to how such states are dressed whether concretely or imaginatively to maintain cohesiveness and self-organization. Clinically, this is illuminated by exploring ways in which compulsive shopping and the choices of what one packs in their suitcase (see Figure 1) or not, highlight how desire and wanting struggle for expression in the context of future uncertainties

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