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Sexual perversions, the florid and frequently bizarre distortions of sexual identity, have attracted the attention of psychoanalytic investigators for the better part of this century. The ritualized denial of imagined castration is the central core of all perversions, and this denial is acted out through the regressive revival of the fantasy of the maternal phallus (Freud, 1905, 1927, 1938; Bak, 1968). The psychoanalytic study of the perversions, particularly that of fetishism, has increasingly implicated preoedipal factors in the constitution of the perversions.
In a series of papers on fetishism, Greenacre (1953, 1955, 1960) emphasized a specific combination of genetic influences. She pointed to disturbances in the first 18 months of life which produced an instability in the formation of the body image and which led to uncertainty of outline and fluctuation in the subjective sense of size. These early disturbances brought about a complementary disturbance in the phallic phase, resulting in an exaggeration of the