Bronstein discusses the relationship between the fetish and transitional objects. He focuses on the role of the mother in the genesis of the childhood fetish that may evolve into an adult fetish. The author reviews the literature and presents clinical material from the analytic therapy of an adult patient. When the parental function of containment of the child’s anxiety and impulses is impaired, the child’s acquisition of objects for the purpose of controlling his or her internal state may be altered from transitional to fetishistic. The parent selects the transitional object which helps relieve the child’s anxieties. When the transitional object is not just a substitute for the mother, but becomes more important than the mother herself, the child becomes addicted to the object and it becomes a fetish. In both the infantile and adult fetish, the ambivalently loved person is replaced by the omnipotently controlled fetish