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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL

OF

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

VOLUME IX APRIL 1928 PART 2

ORIGINAL PAPERS

FETISHISM

BY

SIGM. FREUD

In the last few years I have had an opportunity of studying analytically
a number of men whose object-choice was ruled by a fetish. One
must not suppose that these persons had sought analysis on account
of a fetish; the devotees of fetishes regard them as abnormalities, it
is true, but only rarely as symptoms of illness; usually they are quite
content with them or even extol the advantages they offer for erotic
gratification.

For obvious reasons I cannot go into the details of these cases in
a published paper; nor can I show how the selection of individual
fetishes is in part conditioned by accidental circumstances. The
case of a young man who had exalted a certain kind of ‘shine on the
nose’ into a fetishistic condition seemed most extraordinary. The
very surprising explanation of this was that the patient had been first
brought up in an English nursery and had later gone to Germany,
where he almost completely forgot his mother-
tongue. The fetish,
which derived from his earliest childhood, had to be deciphered into
English, not German; the Glanz auf der Nase [shine on the nose] was
really ‘a glance at the nose’; the nose was thus the fetish, which by
the way he endowed when he wished with the necessary special
brilliance, which other people could not perceive.

In all the cases the meaning and purpose of the fetish turned out
under analysis to be the same. It revealed itself so unequivocally
and seemed to me so categorical that I should expect the same so
in all cases of fetishism. When I now disclose that the fetish is a penis-
substitute I shall certainly arouse disappointment; so I hasten to
add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a par-

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ticular quite special penis that had been extremely important in early
childhood but was afterwards lost. That is to say: it should nor-
mally have been given up, but the purpose of the fetish precisely is to
preserve it from being lost. To put it plainly: the fetish is a substi-
tute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the little boy once
believed in and does not wish to forego–we know why.¹⁾

What had happened, therefore, was that the boy had refused to
take cognizance of the fact perceived by him that a woman has no
penis. No, that cannot be true, for if a woman can be castrated
then his own penis is in danger; and against that there rebels part
of his narcissism which Nature has providentially attached to this
particular organ. In later life grown men may experience a similar
panic, perhaps when the cry goes up that throne and altar are in
danger, and similar illogical consequences will also follow then. If I
am not mistaken, Laforgue would say in this case that the boy ‘skoto-
mizes’ the perception of the woman’s lack of a penis.²⁾ Now a new
term is justified when it describes a new fact or brings it into pro-
minence. There is nothing of that kind here; the oldest word in
our psycho-analytical terminology, ‘repression’, already refers to
this pathological process. If we wish to differentiate between what
happens to the idea as distinct from the affect, we can restrict repres-
sion to relate to the affect; the correct word for what happens to the
idea is then ‘denial’. ‘Skotomization’ seems to me particularly
unsuitable, for it suggests that the perception is promptly obliterated,
so that the result is the same as when a visual impression falls on a
blind spot in the retina. In the case we are discussing, on the con-
trary, we see that the perception has persisted and that a very energetic
action has been exerted to keep up the denial of it. It is not true
that the child emerges from his experience of seeing the female parts
with an unchanged belief in the woman having a phallus. He retains

¹⁾This interpretation was mentioned in 1910, without any reasons being
given for it, in my pamphlet, A Childhood-memory of Leonardo da Vinci’s.

²⁾I correct myself here, however, by adding that I have the best reasons
for knowing that Laforgue would not say this at all. It is clear from his
own remarks that ‘skotomization’ is a term deriving from a description
of dementia præcox, not arising through the application of psycho-analy-
tical conceptions to the psychoses, and cannot be applied to the processes
of development and formation of neurosis. In the text I have been at
pains to demonstrate this incompatibility.

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this belief but he also gives it up; during the conflict between the
deadweight of the unwelcome perception and the force of the opposite
wish, a compromise is constructed such as is only possible in the realm
of unconscious modes of thought-
by the primary processes. In the
world of psychical reality the woman still has a penis in spite of all,
but this penis is no longer the same as it once was. Something else
has taken its place, has been appointed its successor, so to speak, and
now absorbs all the interest which formerly belonged to the penis.
But this interest undergoes yet another very strong reinforcement,
because the horror of castration sets up a sort of permanent memorial
to itself by creating this substitute. Aversion from the real female
genitals, which is never lacking in any fetishist, also remains as an
indelible stigma of the repression that has taken place. One can now
see what the fetish achieves and how it is enabled to persist. It remains
a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a safeguard
against it; it also saves the fetishist from being a homosexual by
endowing women with the attribute which makes them acceptable as
sexual objects. In later life the fetishist sees other advantages in his
substitute for the genital. The significance of fetishes is not known
to the world at large and therefore not prohibited; they are easily
obtainable and sexual gratification by their means is thus very con-
venient. The fetishist has no trouble in getting what other men have
to woo and exert themselves to obtain.

Probably no male human being is spared the shock of threatened
castration at the sight of the female genitals. We cannot explain
why it is that some of them become homosexual in consequence of
this experience, others ward it off by creating a fetish, and the great
majority overcome it. It is possible that we do not yet know, among
all the many factors operating, those which determine the more rare
pathological results; we must be satisfied when 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 selected as substitutes
for the missing penis in the woman would be such as act as symbols
for the penis in other respects. This may happen occasionally but is
certainly not necessarily so. It seems rather that when the fetish
comes to life, so to speak, some process has been suddenly inter-
rupted-
it reminds one of the abrupt halt made by memory in trau-
matic amnesias. In the case of the fetish, too, interest is held up at a
certain point-
what is possibly the last impression received before the

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gruesome traumatic one is preserved as a fetish. Thus the foot or
shoe owes its attraction as a fetish, or part of it, to the circumstance
that the inquisitive boy used to peer up the woman’s legs towards her
genitals. Velvet and fur reproduce—as has long been suspected—
the sight of the pubic hair which ought to have revealed the longed-
for penis; the underlinen so often adopted as a fetish reproduces the
scene of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still
be regarded as phallic. But I do not maintain that it is always possible
to ascertain the determination of every fetish.

Investigations into fetishism are to be recommended to all who still
doubt the existence of the castration complex or who can still believe
that the horror of the female genitals has some other foundation:
for instance, that it derives from a supposed memory of the trauma
of birth. For me there was another point of interest in the explanation
of fetishism.

Not long ago in quite a speculative way I formulated the proposi-
tion that the essential difference between neurosis and psychosis
consists in this: that in neurosis the ego suppresses part of the id in
favour of reality, whereas in psychosis it lets itself be carried away by
the id and detached from a part of reality.³⁾ But soon after this I
had cause to regret that I had been so daring. In the analyses of two
young men I learnt that each of them—one in his second and the other
in his tenth year—had refused to acknowledge the death of his father—
had ‘skotomized’ it—and yet neither of them had developed a psy-
chosis. A very important piece of reality had thus been denied by
the ego, in the same way as the fetishist denies the unwelcome fact
of the woman’s castrated condition. I also began to suspect that
similar occurrences are by no means rare in childhood, and thought
I had made a mistake in my differentiation between neurosis and
psychosis. It is true, there was one way out of the difficulty: it
might be that my formula held good only when a higher degree of
differentiation existed in the mental apparatus; it might be possible
for a child to deal with what would cause severe injury in an adult.
But further research led to another solution of the contradiction.

It turned out, that is, as follows: the two young men had no more
‘skotomized’ the death of their fathers than a fetishist skotomizes
the castration of women. It was only one channel of their mental
life that had remained ignorant of the death of their fathers.

³⁾‘Neurosis and Psychosis’, and ‘The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and
Psychosis’, Collected Papers, Vol. II.

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processes that had not acknowledged the father’s death; there was
another which was fully aware of the fact; the one which was con-
sistent with reality stood alongside the one which accorded with a
wish. One of these two cases of mine had derived an obsessional
neurosis of some severity from this dissociation; in every situation in
life he oscillated between two assumptions—on the one his father was
still alive and hindered him from action, on the other his father was
dead and he had the right to regard himself as his successor. In a
psychosis the true idea which accorded with reality would have been
really absent.

To return to my description of fetishism, I have to add that there
are numerous and very weighty proofs of the double attitude of
fetishists to the question of the castration of women. In very subtle
cases the fetish itself has become the vehicle both of denying and of
asseverating the fact of castration. This was exemplified in the case
of a man whose fetish was a suspensory belt which can also be worn
as bathing drawers; this piece of clothing covers the genitals and
altogether conceals the difference between them. The analysis showed
that it could mean that a woman is castrated, or that she is not cas-
trated, and it even allows of a supposition that a man may be cas-
trated, for all these possibilities could be equally well hidden beneath
the belt; its forerunner in childhood had been the fig-leaf seen on a
statue. Naturally, a fetish of this kind constructed out of two
opposing ideas is capable of great resistance. Sometimes the double
attitude shows itself in what the fetishist—either actually or in
phantasy—does with the fetish. It is not the whole story to say that
he worships it; very often he treats it in a way which is plainly
equivalent to castrating it. This happens particularly when a strong
father-identification has been developed, since the child ascribed the
original castration of the woman to the father. Tender and hostile
treatment of fetishes is mixed in unequal degrees—like the denial
and the recognition of castration—in different cases, so that the one
or the other is more evident. Here one gets a sort of glimpse of
comprehension, as from a distance, of the behaviour of people who
cut off women’s plaits of hair; in them the impulse to execute the
castration which they deny is what comes to the fore. The action
contains within it two incompatible propositions: the woman has still
got a penis and the father has castrated the woman. Another variety
of this, which might be regarded as a race-psychological parallel to
fetishism, is the Chinese custom of first mutilating a woman’s foot and

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then revering it. The Chinese man seems to want to thank the woman
for having submitted to castration.
The normal prototype of all fetishes is the penis of the man, just as
the normal prototype of an organ felt to be inferior is the real little
penis of the woman, the clitoris.