Now that the socialized collective year-end orgasm of popping champagne bottles of frothy fizz and massive fireworks explosions is over, it’s time for our weekly psychoanalysticle, Freudian Fridays. In this issue we indulge an urge we’ve been sublimating for some weeks now; we’re joining the trend of year-end lists by taking a Freudian look at a list of disliked trends from 2008.

Trends serve a purpose, it’s true, by inculcating what is and is not acceptable, and indicating where our social boundaries lie. Freud was all about boundaries, interpreting them and finally transgressing them. With that in mind, we’ve put our inner Freud in touch with those boundary pushers at The Huffington Post, and their recent listicle: 9 Worst Trends of 2008.

Sky-High Heels

Firstly, women’s shoes are a favorite fetish item (witness Sex and the City’s otherwise inexplicable success). Associated with early childhood, female footwear takes us back to a time we were more closely linked to our mother in a playful, idealized, pre-sexual state. Shoes with massive heels are doubly loaded, being both extremely phallic and (because usually pointy and most often wielded by women) a symbol of castration anxiety.

Unapologetic Opulence

Luxury items, of course, fulfill displaced desires for other, more primal things. We fetishize shiny, precious and extravagant objects because they’re easier to acquire than the things we really want.

Boyfriend Jeans

“Daddy denims” is more like it. This pants trend symbolizes a magical resolution of the Electra Complex, whereby a young woman never internalizes her desire for her father. Here, daughter flaunts her love for daddy and even returns to an infant state by wearing childishly oversized pants.

$150,000 Wardrobes

Characterized early on as a “hockey-mom”, Sarah Palin sought to add sex appeal to her look by spending a small fortune. In an extremely cunning (unintended?) stroke of genius, she tried to tap into the electorate’s love of caring parents and our subconscious desire for sexualized mothers. That didn’t really work out for her though; often our desires, when brought too close to the surface, provoke revulsion.

The Pin-Up Look

As posterized by Katy Perry (above), this represents a return to the supposedly more pure and classy sex appeal of yesteryear. In this moment of global crisis, the pin-up look is also a desire for the imagined simplicity of previous decades. In essence, the pin-up trend symbolizes our culture’s desire to dress up in its parents’ clothes and “play doctor.”

Purity Rings

Delightful little Freudian devices, wearing one of these has the uncanny effect of basically guaranteeing that purity will not be kept. Also, they are vaginal symbols into which one inserts a phallic symbol, so one literally violates the ring by putting it on one’s finger.

The Uber-Preppy Look

2008’s penchant for fashionable WASP masquerades is a symptom of the financial crisis. Last year we coped with economic disaster and widespread class instability by donning the garb of a more stable income level, the fashion symbols of wealth that is increasingly unavailable.

The Proliferation of Plastic Surgery

As demonstrated by Heidi Montag (above), our cultural obsession with bodies perfected to the point of obvious artifice reflects a healthy fantasy life coming dangerously close to becoming reality. What happens when a weekend at the clinic gives us the body of our dreams? The same thing that happens when we have sex with our parents, Freud would say.

Trends Period

Like the purity ring that guarantees and even hightens the pleasure taken from inpure thoughts and activities, the “Worst Trends” list and its professed dislike of trends is an inescapable Freudian cycle of uncaniness. Happy to have lept from the chugging locomotive of 2008’s trendiness train, we are nonetheless eager to hop the first iron horse that roars into 2009 with the hottest new comodity.