Read Online Cultures of Fetishism by Louise J. Kaplan - Free Book Online

female penis are not, as we might expect, always or usually symbols of the penis. It would seem that the same process that arrests memory in traumatic amnesia is operative in the choice of fetish. The little boy’s interest comes to a halt at the halfway mark. The last impression before the traumatic moment becomes the fetish: “Thus the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish to the circumstance that the inquisitive little boy peered at the woman’s genitals from her legs up.” 51 Fur and velvet, which represent the pubic hair that covers the genitals, are also favored fetishes. Similarly, pieces of underclothing crystallize the last moment that the woman could still be regarded as phallic. At this point in his explanation, Freud drops the discussion of the childhood origins of fetishism and dashes off to a new topic; something that had been of theoretical interest to him for a long time. He was employing the topic of fetishism to take him toward a more satisfactory explanation of the difference between neurosis and psychosis. When he wrote The Ego and the Id in 1920, he had thought that in neurosis, the ego suppresses a piece of the id, whereas in psychoses the id suppresses a piece of reality. But now, seven years later, he realizes there is another possible solution. Freud begins to explore the possibil- ity that a person could simultaneously avow a piece of reality but also disavow it. In connection with this new theoretical possibility Freud brings in two
    young men who had lost their fathers when they were children.
    Freud does not enlist the childhood histories of these two young men because they were involved with castration or horrifying discoveries of genital absence, or sexuality, or, in fact, with any concrete fetish object. However, their responses to their fathers’ deaths do express succinctly the defensive structure of the fetishism perversion. Each child had thought about the death of his beloved father in much the same way that a fetishist thinks about a woman’s body. Each of them knew that his father had died. Yet, at the same time, they did not know and had not acknowledged this death. They were, so to speak, of two minds. 52
    Disavowal , the psychological defense of having it both ways, is now thought to be one of our primary defense mechanisms, prior to and more fundamental than repression, originating in the earliest years of childhood, when the blurring between what is and what is not is characteristic.
    Disavowal is the sine non qua of sexual fetishism. According to Freud, a sexual fetishist devises his fetish so that he can have it both ways. He can disregard reality and all the facts to the contrary and continue to believe that a woman has a penis. Yet, all the while, he will continue to take account of reality and recognize that she does not have a penis. Thus the fetish is both a substitute penis, she does have a penis , and “a memorial to the horror of castration,” therefore she does not have a penis. Freud’s likening of fetishism
    to death sounds the note of destruction that will be echoed in his concluding remarks on the mutilations of women’s bodies.
    Very often the defense of having it both ways shows up in the elaborate mental convolutions that determine the construction of the fetish. To show how this works, Freud brings in the example of the man whose fetish was an athletic supporter. 53
    This garment, an elaborately constructed jock strap, was often worn as part of a man’s swimming suit. It covers up the genitals entirely and thus conceals the difference between the sexes. But Freud’s apparently simple example of the athletic supporter fetish has in it more than a few befuddle- ments. Only one thing is certain, the garment is masculine. But who is wearing the supporter? Is it the fetishist himself? Or does the man require that his female sexual partner wear the supporter and cover up her female genitals with a masculine garment that disguises the sexual difference?