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Meyer gives a stimulating account of Conrad's preoccupation with fetishism as depicted in his novels. His obsession with hair is shown in the description of how he vigorously brushed his hair after his emotional upset over the news of his son's marriage. The same behavior is later illustrated by Alvan Herveys in The Return when, shocked at the news of his wife's deserting him for a lover, he dispassionately brushes his hair as if to reassure himself of his own reflection and defend against a loss (castration).
Hair frequently crops up in various phallic forms in Conrad's writings. Attention is also drawn to foot and fur fetishism. The author attributes scopophilic, exhibitionistic, and fetishistic tendencies to Conrad's need to identify himself with the aphallic mother. Meyer suggests that Conrad suffered repeated early trauma due to his family's exile to northern Russia, his mother's tuberculosis and subsequent death when he was eleven years old. He implies that in the suffering love relationships depicted in his heroes, Conrad expressed a wish for a reunion with mother in death.