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84F
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
24 February 1910
Dear Colleague,
I am uncommonly pleased at being able to help you in something. Unfortunately it is only very little, but make any use of it you wish.
I have investigated only one case in detail; of others in which the subject of fetishism was instructively touched on I have only the results, not the notes.
The case was that of a highly educated, elegant, and sophisticated man of 25, who carefully adjusted the creases in his trousers before lying down for the first time on the Ψα couch.1 He turned out to be a clothes fetishist in the better sense of the word, attached great importance to elegance and taste in his own clothes, and found a female person “impossible” if her dressing did not meet his ideal demands. He suddenly lost all interest in a girl who had greatly attracted him when she turned up for a rendezvous unsuitably dressed.
He was ψ impotent2 and, according to analysis, fixated on his mother, who had for years made him watch her dressing and undressing, at least up to the penultimate point, who is completely in love with him and would still be inclined to such intimacies to the present day, in spite of his withdrawing from them now. (During the treatment he achieved excellent potency but remained ψ anaesthetic.) He was also a boot fetishist, also not of the crudest kind. His childhood was full of unusually intense coprophilic activity. At the age of eight to ten, for instance, he managed to keep a hard sausage hanging from his rectum, from which he kept breaking off little bits in the course of the day. He still was an over-sensitive “smeller”. In the years of puberty he was a voyeur, his masturbation began with his spying on undressing American women3 in a Swiss hotel.
I have learnt from other cases that boot fetishism goes back to an original pleasure (olfactory pleasure) in the dirty and stinking foot. As it is, this object also recurs in the positive perversion. I regard coprophilic olfactory pleasure as being the