Freud - Complete Works (737 page)

   The fateful question for the
human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their
cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of
their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and
self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the
present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control
over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help
they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the
last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their
current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And
now it is to be expected that the other of the two ‘Heavenly
Powers’, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself
in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can
foresee with what success and with what result?

4533

FETISHISM

(1927)

4534

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4535

FETISHISM

In the last few years I have had an
opportunity of studying analytically a number of men whose
object-choice was dominated by a fetish. There is no need to expect
that these people came to analysis on account of their fetish. For
though no doubt a fetish is recognized by its adherents as an
abnormality, it is seldom felt by them as the symptom of an ailment
accompanied by suffering. Usually they are quite satisfied with it,
or even praise the way in which it eases their erotic life. As a
rule, therefore, the fetish made its appearance in analysis as a
subsidiary finding.

   For obvious reasons the details
of these cases must be withheld from publication; I cannot,
therefore, show in what way accidental circumstances have
contributed to the choice of a fetish. The most extraordinary case
seemed to me to be one in which a young man had exalted a certain
sort of ‘shine on the nose’ into a fetishistic
precondition. The surprising explanation of this was that the
patient had been brought up in an English nursery but had later
come to Germany, where he forgot his mother-tongue almost
completely. The fetish, which originated from his earliest
childhood, had to be understood in English, not German. The
‘shine on the nose’ - was in reality a
‘
glance
at the nose’. The nose was thus the
fetish, which, incidentally, he endowed at will with the luminous
shine which was not perceptible to others.

   In every instance, the meaning
and the purpose of the fetish turned out, in analysis, to be the
same. It revealed itself so naturally and seemed to me so
compelling that I am prepared to expect the same solution in all
cases of fetishism. When now I announce that the fetish is a
substitute for the penis, I shall certainly create disappointment;
so I hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance
penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that had been
extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost.
That is to say, it should normally have been given up, but the
fetish is precisely designed to preserve it from extinction. To put
it more plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s
(the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and
- for reasons familiar to us - does not want to give up.¹

  
¹
This interpretation was made as early as
1910, in my study on Leonardo da Vinci, without any reasons being
given for it.

Fetishism

4536

   What happened, therefore, was
that the boy refused to take cognizance of the fact of his having
perceived that a woman does not possess a penis. No, that could not
be true: for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession
of a penis was in danger; and against that there rose in rebellion
the portion of his narcissism which Nature has, as a precaution,
attached to that particular organ. In later life a grown man may
perhaps experience a similar panic when the cry goes up that Throne
and Altar are in danger, and similar illogical consequences will
ensue. If I am not mistaken, Laforgue would say in this case that
the boy ‘scotomizes’ his perception of the
woman’s lack of a penis.¹ A new technical term is
justified when it describes a new fact or emphasizes it. This is
not so here. The oldest word in our psycho-analytic terminology,
‘repression’, already relates to this pathological
process. If we wanted to differentiate more sharply between the
vicissitude of the
idea
as distinct from that of the
affect
, and reserve the word
‘
Verdrängung
’ [‘repression’]
for the affect, then the correct German word for the vicissitude of
the idea would be ‘
Verleugnung
’
[’disavowal’]. ‘Scotomization’ seems to me
particularly unsuitable, for it suggests that the perception is
entirely wiped out, so that the result is the same as when a visual
impression falls on the blind spot in the retina. In the situation
we are considering, on the contrary, we see that the perception has
persisted, and that a very energetic action has been undertaken to
maintain the disavowal. It is not true that, after the child has
made his observation of the woman, he has preserved unaltered his
belief that women have a phallus. He has retained that belief, but
he has also given it up. In the conflict between the weight of the
unwelcome perception and the force of his counter-wish, a
compromise has been reached, as is only possible under the
dominance of the unconscious laws of thought - the primary
processes. Yes, in his mind the woman
has
got a penis, in
spite of everything; but this penis is no longer the same as it was
before. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its
substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest which was
formerly directed to its predecessor. But this interest suffers an
extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration
has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute.
Furthermore, an aversion, which is never absent in any fetishist,
to the real female genitals remains a
stigma indelebile
of
the repression that has taken place. We can now see what the fetish
achieves and what it is that maintains it. It remains a token of
triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it.
It also saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing
women with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual
objects. In later life, the fetishist feels that he enjoys yet
another advantage from his substitute for a genital. The meaning of
the fetish is not known to other people, so the fetish is not
withheld from him: it is easily accessible and he can readily
obtain the sexual satisfaction attached to it. What other men have
to woo and make exertions for can be had by the fetishist with no
trouble at all.

  
¹
I correct myself, however, by adding that I
have the best reasons for supposing that Laforgue would not say
anything of the sort. It is clear from his own remarks that
‘scotomization’ is a term which derives from
descriptions of dementia praecox, which does not arise from a
carrying-over of psycho-analytic concepts to the psychoses and
which has no application to developmental processes or to the
formation of neuroses. In his exposition in the text of his paper,
the author has been at pains to make this incompatibility
clear.

Fetishism

4537

   Probably no male human being is
spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital.
Why some people become homosexual as a consequence of that
impression, while others fend it off by creating a fetish, and the
great majority surmount it, we are frankly not able to explain. It
is possible that, among all the factors at work, we do not yet know
those which are decisive for the rare pathological results. We must
be content if we can explain what has happened, and may for the
present leave on one side the task of explaining why something has
not
happened.

   One would expect that the organs
or objects chosen as substitutes for the absent female phallus
would be such as appear as symbols of the penis in other
connections as well. This may happen often enough, but is certainly
not a deciding factor. It seems rather that when the fetish is
instituted some process occurs which reminds one of the stopping of
memory in traumatic amnesia. As in this latter case, the
subject’s interest comes to a halt half-way, as it were; it
is as though the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic
one is retained as a fetish. Thus the foot or shoe owes its
preference as a fetish - or a part of it - to the circumstance that
the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from
below, from her legs up; fur and velvet - as has long been
suspected - are a fixation of the sight of the pubic hair, which
should have been followed by the longed-for sight of the female
member; pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a
fetish, crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in
which the woman could still be regarded as phallic. But I do not
maintain that it is invariably possible to discover with certainty
how the fetish was determined.

   An investigation of fetishism is
strongly recommended to any one who still doubts the existence of
the castration complex or who can still believe that fright at the
sight of the female genital has some other ground - for instance,
that it is derived from a supposed recollection of the trauma of
birth.

   For me, the explanation of
fetishism had another point of theoretical interest as well.
Recently, along quite speculative lines, I arrived at the
proposition that the essential difference between neurosis and
psychosis was that in the former the ego, in the service of
reality, suppresses a piece of the id, whereas in a psychosis it
lets itself be induced by the id to detach itself from a piece of
reality. I returned to this theme once again later on.¹ But
soon after this I had reason to regret that I had ventured so far.
In the analysis of two young men I learned that each - one when he
was two years old and the other when he was ten - had failed to
take cognizance of the death of his beloved father - had
‘scotomized’ it - and yet neither of them had developed
a psychosis. Thus a piece of reality which was undoubtedly
important had been disavowed by the ego, just as the unwelcome fact
of women’s castration is disavowed in fetishists. I also
began to suspect that similar occurrences in childhood are by no
means rare, and I believed that I had been guilty of an error in my
characterization of neurosis and psychosis. It is true that there
was one way out of the difficulty. My formula needed only to hold
good where there was a higher degree of differentiation in the
psychical apparatus; things might be permissible to a child which
would entail severe injury to an adult.

  
¹
‘Neurosis and Psychosis’
(1924
b
) and ‘The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and
Psychosis’ (1924
e
).

Fetishism

4538

   But further research led to
another solution of the contradiction. It turned out that the two
young men had no more ‘scotomized’ their father’s
death than a fetishist does the castration of women. It was only
one current in their mental life that had not recognized their
father’s death; there was another current which took full
account of that fact. The attitude which fitted in with the wish
and the attitude which fitted in with reality existed side by side.
In one of my two cases this split had formed the basis of a
moderately severe obsessional neurosis. The patient oscillated in
every situation in life between two assumptions: the one, that his
father was still alive and was hindering his activities; the other,
opposite one, that he was entitled to regard himself as his
father’s successor. I may thus keep to the expectation that
in a psychosis the one current - that which fitted in with reality
- would have in fact been absent.

   Returning to my description of
fetishism, I may say that there are many and weighty additional
proofs of the divided attitude of fetishists to the question of the
castration of women. In very subtle instances both the disavowal
and the affirmation of the castration have found their way into the
construction of the fetish itself. This was so in the case of a man
whose fetish was an athletic support-belt which could also be worn
as bathing drawers. This piece of clothing covered up the genitals
entirely and concealed the distinction between them. Analysis
showed that it signified that women were castrated and that they
were not castrated; and it also allowed of the hypothesis that men
were castrated, for all these possibilities could equally well be
concealed under the belt - the earliest rudiment of which in his
childhood had been the fig-leaf on a statue. A fetish of this sort,
doubly derived from contrary ideas, is of course especially
durable. In other instances the divided attitude shows itself in
what the fetishist does with his fetish, whether in reality or in
his imagination. To point out that he reveres his fetish is not the
whole story; in many cases he treats it in a way which is obviously
equivalent to a representation of castration. This happens
particularly if he has developed a strong identification with his
father and plays the part of the latter; for it is to him that as a
child he ascribed the woman’s castration. Affection and
hostility in the treatment of the fetish - which run parallel with
the disavowal and the acknowledgement of castration - are mixed in
unequal proportions in different cases, so that the one or the
other is more clearly recognizable. We seem here to approach an
understanding, even if a distant one, of the behaviour of the
‘
coupeur de nattes
’. In him the need to carry
out the castration which he disavows has come to the front. His
action contains in itself the two mutually incompatible assertions:
‘the woman has still got a penis’ and ‘my father
has castrated the woman’. Another variant, which is also a
parallel to fetishism in social psychology, might be seen in the
Chinese custom of mutilating the female foot and then revering it
like a fetish after it has been mutilated. It seems as though the
Chinese male wants to thank the woman for having submitted to being
castrated.

   In conclusion we may say that the
normal prototype of fetishes is a man’s penis, just as the
normal prototype of inferior organs is a woman’s real small
penis, the clitoris.