In a letter to the Editor, McCully comments on Epstein's case (which appeared in the above journal in 1975) and concerned the shoe fetish of a fifteen-year-old boy. The fetish consisted in wetting and drying a woman's canvas shoes, then making her wear high-heeled shoes and finally paying her for these services. Epstein states that there may be ‘extrapersonal factors’ that endow an object with fetish powers. McCully considers these factors to be of archetypal nature.

He briefly deals with the personal aspects of the fetish (illustrated by a dream of Epstein's patient), and then discusses the positive and negative aspect of the shoe as an archetypal symbol. A shoe can stand for eros and relatedness (Cinderella's glass slipper ‘mediating an adapted love relationship’). It can equally stand for ‘recessive unadaptive effort to relate’. The latter McCully illustrates with the behaviour of one of his patients