Fetishism in Statu Nascendi1

My friendship with the parents of a little boy of four permitted me to observe him. He was an only child, the centre of attention and the object of over-tenderness from both the mother and father, as well as from relatives and friends. The observations I am going to present will not strike you as new, since psycho-analytical practice offers the opportunity to reconstruct early childhood happenings similar to these. The only reason for presenting them is to add to the evidence behind Freud's most recent conception of fetishism, described first in 1928.

I shall give you a brief history of the little boy, so that the connection between the symptoms and his preceding experiences should be more comprehensible.

Harry was precocious and his mental development was very rapid. His interest in and curiosity about all things was the most outstanding of his characteristics, and led like a red thread through every phase of his development. It showed itself in innumerable questions about everything and everybody. But this stopped to a great degree at about the age of four, when he began to try to figure out things for himself, such as numbers, the meaning of words, etc. When I first took notice of the rather curious habit I am about to describe, he was just four, and had been indulging in the habit for a few months. The habit consisted of stroking and kissing the shoes of women friends of his mother, but only those friends whom he liked exceptionally well. Also, when women friends were seated around the table, he tried to lift their skirts and to peer under them. This habit of exploring under the skirt reached back to about a year previous; the mother had first noticed it on a boat excursion. Harry was trying to lift up her own skirt and that of a woman friend and made quite a scene when reproached. More recently he had been asking repeatedly—in reference to one particular friend of his mother—whether she had the same big pussy (this was his word for penis) as daddy, to