Meetings of The New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Charles Feigelson noted that if a strict definition of a fetish as an object that inspires sexual arousal and is consciously eroticized is used, the patient's shoelace would not be considered a fetish. Using a broader definition—that it unconsciously represents a maternal phallus and is obligatory for sexual experience—it could be included. He cited Winnicott who stated that string universally symbolizes joining, wrapping, and communication, but when it is used to deny separation, a perversion may develop as in the patient described. He noted that Greenacre has said the phallic-oedipal period is a time when traumatic disturbance 'leaves the deposit of specific content compulsively or ritualistically acted out'.

Dr. Walter Stewart discussed the relationship of childhood fetish and the fetish of structuralized perversion, of preoedipal and phallic phase castration anxiety, and of preoedipal and phallic phases to fetishistic perversions. In Freud's formulation of fetishism, the fetish symbolizes the mother's phallus and serves to deny and affirm her castration. Dr. Stewart felt there was insufficient genetic evidence of the vicissitudes of aggression and libido in Mrs. Spiegel's case to confirm that in the 'pure' fantasy the body represented a phallus and the string a symbolic penis. Further, there is little clinical evidence that transitional objects, generally cuddly, are related to the later true fetish. Female fetishism has only a superficial resemblance to the male perversion. Dr. Stewart preferred to view the observations presented by Mrs. Spiegel as related to the multiple function of an inanimate object in the life history of a female patient.