“Pantyhose Fetishism and Self-Cohesion: A Paraphilic Solution?” Response to Ken Corbett

Stepping outside the consulting room can be interesting but dangerous to our profession. Before his untimely death Stoller (1985a, b, 1991) and Stoller and Levine (1993) made several forays into the real world of perversion. Stoller's dialogues with centerfolds, consensual S&M'ers, dominatrixs and those who offered pay for view/participate (to willing customers) provided us with a close-up view of the macabre underground world of the “pervert” outside the consulting room. Stoller believed that if we were to really learn about our patients we had to speak their language, avoid psychoanalytic jargon and unwarranted theorizing, and listen to the patient's actual words in the dialogue of therapy. At times, he suggested, we may have to go outside the consultation room to learn about our patients. Person and Ovesey (1978) even visited transvestite and transsexual support groups to learn more about the phenomenon and to clinically inform their psychoanalytic perspective on how gender is experienced outside the consulting room.

Stoller cautioned us that psychoanalytic jargon may obscure the real clinical phenomenon and further our misunderstanding of what is really presented in the consulting room. Our words shape and create the object and subject of our clinical interests. Schafer (1976) has even argued for a new language of psychoanalysis that would be more approximate to what the patient experiences. What we learned from