Nude Psychotherapy

Nude psychotherapy was the use of non-sexual social nudity as an intentional means of improving a participant's psychological health. Largely forgotten today, having never achieved mainstream acceptance, the practice traces its origin to psychological studies of the effects of social nudity on naturists' lives in the 1930s, developed in the 1960s alongside the encounter group movement as a way to challenge preconceptions and promote intimacy and trust, and declined in the 1980s. In contemporary America, nudity has instead been incorporated into workshops and therapies for health and wellbeing generally conducted outside the medical and psychological professions.