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A man described himself as a moral masochist and said he was satisfied with his autoerotic daydreams in which he was a woman's willing slave in kissing her feet. Feeling quite satisfied with the results of his analysis and having decided to go on with it, he said: “Nothing has changed, but while before I saw myself as benefiting from my fantasies, now I see myself as their victim.” Thus, the day came when, having met a woman in reality, he was able to have access to real sexual relations. This meeting had an impact on his fantasy, but admittedly without really modifying it. What he liked about this idealised woman was her body: her feet, “of course”, her thighs and her breasts; but her sexual organs remained a part that he left between parentheses, that he still found unsightly, even repugnant, and that he strived not to see. In short, they were unbearably ugly and the object of absolute horror. This obliged him, in the act of “coitus” (his language was always extremely precise), to engage in rather complex mental gymnastics, which he described with humour. This involved an oscillation between real sexual organs that were terribly metonymic, with which he was obliged to be in the greatest contiguity, something he could not accept, and a woman whose foot − and by default a part of the body − embodied ideally, and metaphorically, the object of his desire.
With the fetish, we are dealing both with an ordinary, and even trivial, object that permits disavowal (Verleugnung) and, at the same time, with the object that represents the maternal penis and which, in its uniqueness, and in an exclusive way, is the condition of jouissance. It is between these two senses that the oscillation between metaphor and metonymy is played out for the subject with very great precision and fragility.
In its simple metonymic sense (an immediate sense: the boot, in Luis Buñuel's 1964 film Diary of a Chambermaid), the fetish brushes aside the sexual and, in its metaphoric sense, it is what reali