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The study of directors as auteurs, or authors who maintain the creative control and vision of their films, presupposes the presence of reoccurring themes that reveal the distinct personality of the director. The Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel and the French writer/director Alain Robbe-Grillet, who shares surrealist affinities with Buñuel, reveal the presence of feet and foot fetishism throughout the body of their work. Buñuel's use of acute details and cinematic style demonstrates a shrewd understanding of psychological truths regarding foot fetishism that are applicable for the psychoanalyst. Lacan saw Buñuel's El “at a special screening for psychiatrists at the Cinematheque in Paris and praised certain of its psychological truths” (Buñuel, 1984, p. 204). Lacan emphasizes the fundamental importance of the study of fetishism for psychoanalysis.“Freud himself recommends the study of fetishism to all who wish to understand the fear of castration and the Oedipus complex. To the disciples of psychoanalysis as to its detractors, the importance given to the Oedipus complex has always been the touchstone of one's overall attitude toward analysis” (Lacan and Granoff, 1956, p. 265).
Robbe-Grillet's views that our notions of perversion and deviant behavior are culturally conditioned is supported by a broad range of critical investigation. Muensterberger corroborates Robbe-Grillet's assertion. “The problem of perversion and deviant behavior is not confined to psychology and psychiatry. It also exists in the domains of sociology, anthropology and history” (Muensterberger, 1956, p. 55). Furthermore, our social environment is in a constant state of flux, thereby affecting our concepts of normality or deviant behavior and “our aims and needs are largely conditioned by culture and social structure” (p. 56).
In addition to the psychological truths and exploration of the