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[Göttingen] 6.xi.27
Dear Professor,
May I have another talk with you? The short essay on ‘Fetishism’196 in the Almanach has electrified me! It has something so convincing about it through and through. I myself would never have hit upon such a thing! And yet now that I look back upon my experience with my analysands and on what I have read and heard I see so much that confirms it; especially perhaps that genuine fetishists are only to be found among men. I have never had genuine fetishists as patients, but I have had one or two with tendencies in that direction, and they were obsessional neurotics.
For women have never experienced the great shock of discovering the absence of their own penis in their mother. In the male it is this discovery which gives rise in the first place to the incest-situation, which confirms him as a male in relation to the female parent. Thus even before the incest-situation has arisen, he has been confronted with an overwhelming experience, which is totally suppressed and to which he never returns again in later life. Whereas the girl is concerned with real things and sensual experience, the man is haunted in the farthest recesses of his mind by a hidden and peculiar romanticism, an exciting piece of unreality, which inevitably continues to exercise a secret influence upon his love-life. Whereas, with the help of his castration fears, he works through the incest-situation in himself, diverts his secret desire from his mother and seeks to degrade her, along with her whole sex, more or less to the status of a whore, there nevertheless remains in him a primordial relationship to the ‘mother figure with a penis’, who was his sexual equal and yet much superior to himself, both protecting and surpassing him. He must find some solution to this situation; does he not do so perhaps in that love of the ‘masculine anaclitic type’ which you have described for us (in The Ego and the Id)? This is in itself understandable—as a result of the battle against the