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This is a paper about the foot as a Freudian symbol. I will not discuss the foot as a fetish, a subject on which there is already a good deal of literature. Foot symbolism and foot fetishism are, of course, not unrelated topics, but to keep the discussion within reasonable limits I will confine myself to foot symbolism, and leave it to those readers with a special knowledge of fetishism to make the connections between the two topics where appropriate.
The topic of symbolism, except for the work of Shengold (1991, 1993), has virtually disappeared from the psychoanalytic literature, as interest has shifted from sexuality and the id to exploring the nuances of the transference-countertransference interaction, and its relation to very early mother-infant interactions. Shengold (1993) lays down what seems to me a reasonable classification of symbolism, dividing it into three categories: later developed word or linguistic symbols, displacement symbols (which involve a displacement from one part of the body ego to another, as in foot symbolism), and the primal Freudian symbols. A good example of the third category would be the equation of a house with the mother and with the female genitals, an equation that appears in the clinical material that follows.
A patient of mine, a man in his mid-thirties who suffered from an obsessional neurosis, had the following dream in the eighth month of his five-sessions-per-week analysis: He was at a seaside resort. It seemed like a seedy sort of place. He was in front of an auditorium or casino. There was litter and mud all around, and he was standing or walking barefoot in the mess.