The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 24, 1955, No. 1: Phyllis Greenacre. 'The Mutual Adventures of Jonathan Swift and Lemuel Gulliver.'

Greenacre is interested in distortions of the body image which she believes have a particular significance in fetishism. This paper is extracted from a book in preparation on Swift and Lewis Carroll. Here she reconstructs Swift's biography and early fantasies by comparing his own life with that of Gulliver. Though Swift was not an overt fetishist there was much in his personality which he shared with the fetishist. He fulfilled a fetishistic need by converting girls into boys in his fantasy, but he did not need an actual fetish because he resigned from physical genitality.

The Travels are largely the projection into activity of Gulliver's masturbation fantasies, which, like the character of Swift, are closly interwoven with anal problems and ambitions. The problems of changes in body size (based on phallic functioning) are characteristically reflected on to the total body, and much reinforced by the theme of the reversal of generations. There is much less substitution of different parts of the body for the phallus than is to be found in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.