Cultures of Fetishism (7 page)

Freud then turns his attention to “the mutilated creature.” And this is where the serious trouble begins. Until the writing of this essay, Freud had repre- sented infantile sexuality as if the female’s sexual development and even her Oedipus complex were mirrors of the little boy’s developmental trials. As Peter Gay remarks in his biography of Freud, “these were technical issues, a subject for research rather than polemics.”
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But, Gay then raises a forceful criticism of Freud’s re-examination of the developmental schedules of boys and girls. When Freud now claimed “that the little girl is a failed boy, the grown woman a kind of castrated male,” he “put a match to inflammable material.”
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As Gay depicts the changes in Freud’s thinking, “his robust and caustic language” represented “a turn to the right, subverting his own idea,”
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so congenial to the feminists of that time, that males and females have very similar psychological histories. “There was nothing in the climate of the 1920’s that would make him propound his controversial, at times scurrilous, views on women.”
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However, while Gay attributes this sea change to Freud’s attempt to puzzle through some difficulties in his new way of thinking about the Oedipus com- plex, I am, as I mentioned earlier, attributing these “caustic” and “scurrilous” attitudes toward women to the physical castrations that Freud had endured and continued to endure until the end of his life. No doubt, there is some measure of truth to Gay’s assumption about the theoretical issues motivating these changes, but his explanation is not sufficient to account for the destructive misogynism expressed in Freud’s later views on female anatomy.

In comparing the little girl’s Oedipus complex to the little boy’s, Freud says, “The situation is quite different for a little girl, who does not turn to disavowal or wait for later experiences to confirm her perceptions and feelings.”
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The little girl knows at once that she is castrated. When she first catches sight of the boy’s genital, the girl “makes her judgment and her deci- sion in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it.”
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Moreover, the hope of someday obtaining a penis in spite of every- thing and so of becoming like a man may persist. Or, “a girl may refuse to accept the
fact
of being castrated, may harden herself in the conviction that she
does
possess a penis, and may subsequently be compelled to behave as though she were a man (
itals.
mine).”
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Furthermore, “after a woman has become aware of the
wound
to her narcissism, she develops like a
scar
, a sense of inferiority.”
45
The words I have italicized in these quotations play into my interpretations of the motives underlying Freud’s misogynism.

Let us make a special note of Freud’s phrasing: a
horror of the mutilated creature
on the boy’s part, and the
fact
of being castrated on the little girl’s part. The ideas that the female is mutilated and castrated are here represented as facts and not fantasies. And also note that ominous
scar
that results from the
wound
to her narcissism. Do these eccentricities in language and thought in his 1925 paper reflect Freud’s unconscious responses to the mutilations and scars and wounds that his mouth had been subjected to—especially the surgically created cavity that joined oral and nasal cavities? Or, had such language and thought been present in his pre-1923 writings on fetishism, castration, and the anatomical differences?

The thoughts were present long before 1923. But the eccentricies in language and the assaultive tone and the urgency came after the catastrophes of 1923.

As early as 1905, in “Three Essays on Sexuality,” Freud had referred to the clitoris as a less than adequate masculine organ. He theorized that it was the little boy’s fear of his own castration that might urge him to create a fetish like a garter belt or high-heeled shoe later in life. This fear of castration was said to be partly an outcome of the boy’s Oedipus complex and his secret

wish of wanting to displace his father in his mother’s affections, and partly an outcome of chance sightings of the female genitals.

From 1905 onward, the eroticization of the foot had been Freud’s favorite example of fetishism. In his earlier descriptions of this popular and typical form of fetishism, Freud’s attitudes toward the female were more friendly and toned with erotic vitality. The dramatic change that took place after 1923 is the relative balance between the erotic and destructive elements in his thoughts about women and the female body. Before then Freud’s thoughts on fetishism and castration were linked to a theory of eroticism and to the “adhesiveness” of early “libidinal” attractions.

Themes that associated fetishism with castration and the fundamental inferiority of the visible female genital—the clitoris—were present in Freud’s earliest writings. However, when these ideas are re-iterated and reinforced in his post-1923 writings on female sexuality and femininity, they are presented in the context of a project that stood on its own. It was after 1923 that Freud, suddenly, for no apparent reason, began to devote entire essays to the subject of the female sexuality and her castrated genitals. It was then that the “caustic” and “scurrilous” language about the female genitals began to take over his writings.

I am proposing that the intensity of his focus on the topic of female castration was, in part at least, a response to his own “castrations.” Perhaps, by emphasizing the differences between the mutilated creatures and the penis-possessing creatures of the male sex, he was disavowing the feminine identifications that had been aroused by the mutilations that were being inflicted on his own body?

Until now we have seen how Freud acknowledged, on several occasions, the changes that had taken place in the way he pursued his psychoanalytic research in the years after his surgery, changes that corresponded to emotional alterations taking place within himself. Moreover, though Freud doesn’t acknowledge this directly, a brief review of his pre-1923 writings on fetishism has demonstrated an emphasis on the erotic and libidinal precursors of fetishism, rather than the emphasis on the “horror” produced by the sight- ings of the castrated organs of the female.

There was another change, a more subtle change in himself, that Freud also noticed. He tries to explain the nature of this alteration in self-experience in the same letter to Lou Andreas-Salome, where he speaks of “the crust of indifference . . . slowly creeping up around me.” In this context, he continues:

The change taking place is perhaps not very noticeable; everything is as interesting as it was before; neither are the ingredients very different; but some kind of resonance is lacking; unmusical as I am, I imagine the difference to be something like using the pedal or not. The never-ceasing tangible pressure of a vast number of unpleasant sensations must have accelerated this otherwise perhaps premature condition, this tendency to experience everything
sub specie aeternitatis
.
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And finally, in a concluding passage of that letter, Freud tells Salome: “I still have important work to do, but I must hurry. I must fight against the inexorable Chronos, I must do this before the resonance becomes even more muted.”
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Certainly the diminution of resonance or intonation could transform what might have been some discriminating nuances in his perceptions of the female genitals into crude and untamed expressions of the same ideas—what Gay referred to as “caustic” and “scurrilous.” Also, in reading through “Fetishism,” one cannot discount a possible connection between the hurried urgency Freud was experiencing and the awkward way he strings together the multitude of ideas and themes that he raises, one after the other, in rapid succession. In other words the “descent into destruction” could very well be an outcome of these less tangible side-effects—his loss of resonance, his sense of urgency.

With these considerations in mind, let us take a closer look at “Fetishism,” and the characters Freud selected to illustrate his theory. Along the way we will come across some valid and potentially valuable ideas about
fetishism, the sexual perversion
. I will be stressing, however, the loss of resonance, the sense of urgency and, most important, the gradual descent from a dis- course of eroticism to a discourse of destructive aggression, which is a manifestation of a major principle of the fetishism strategy. As I said at the outset, by describing fetishism, the sexual perversion that is the focus of Freud’s paper and the fetishism strategy that is the focus of this book, side- by-side, I will be clarifying the differences between the two forms of fetishism.

I begin with the young man who devised a shine on the nose as his fetish, more precisely the young lady whose nose was blessed with that luminous shine—a blessing that very often only he could perceive. Freud uses this example, which he selected from the numerous men he had studied analyti- cally, all of whom made the choice of a loved one on the basis of her posses- sion of a special feature in her physical make-up. In this instance, as in so many cases like it, the fetish is not a concrete object, but rather a tangible characteristic of the loved one that became essential to the young man’s sex- ual enjoyment.

With his case of the luminous nose, Freud wanted to demonstrate the acci- dental circumstances that are decisive in the choice of a fetish or the choice of a loved one. Strangely enough, however, the example Freud has chosen does not clarify just what these accidental circumstances might be. The young man’s choice of love object seems to have little or nothing to do with an early libidinal attraction or the sighting of a “castrated” genital. His fetishistic obsession hinges on a twist, one could say an accidental coincidence, in language translation. I must wonder, in that connection, why Freud chooses such an idiosyncratic example and then, having made that choice, doesn’t bother to explain the connection between the “shine on the nose” and the

missing penis of the woman, the woman’s castration, all the subjects that then become the central focus of “Fetishism.”

All that Freud tells us about this particular young man is that when he was a very little boy, he and his family lived in England, where one day or perhaps on several occasions, he happened to “glance” at a woman’s nose. When he was a few years older, his family moved to Germany, where he learned to speak German, which then became his primary language. The word “Glanz” in German means “shine.” And thus, explains Freud, the boy became fixated on the idea of a woman with a shine on her nose.
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This is all that is said about the young man and his lady friend with the luminous nose. We are left with a halfway explanation of the origins of his fetish. And then suddenly and abruptly Freud changes the topic. The flow of ideas is rushed and urgent, as though there was no time or energy to explain things further or to draw out the connections between the “shine on the nose,” and the topic that follows. Perhaps Freud thought the entire matter was simply too obvious to explain further? Or perhaps his next paragraph, though it appears to be a non sequitor, is an attempt at explanation? It suggests that the nose was one of those all-too-obvious phallic symbols. Nevertheless, this going from one topic to another is not characteristic of Freud’s literary style, where usually the logical connections between ideas were as important as the ideas themselves.

In the first sentence of the next paragraph Freud explains that in all cases of fetishism that he has treated, the purpose of the fetish turned out to be the same:

When now I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, I shall certainly create disappointment; so I hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost. . . . To put it more plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s [the mother’s] penis that the little boy had once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up.
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At this point Freud has forgotten the young man who was attracted to his lady friend’s luminous nose. His comments on the mother’s penis carry his attentions to some little boy or other, probably alluding to all little boys, who are inevitably, sooner or later, “faced” with the sight of a woman without a penis. Freud explains that the little boy’s perception of this fact of life, this sight of a woman without a penis, is too threatening for him to accept. After all, to fully acknowledge that a woman had lost her penis (for why else would she not have one?) would mean that he too might lose his penis, the organ of his body that is so heavily invested with his own narcissism and self-worth.

So, what does the little boy do? Does he deny what he has seen in an effort to preserve his narcissism and own bodily integrity? Or, does he acknowledge what he has seen? Apparently neither of these distinct possibilities are open to the little boy. Or, rather, he must have it both ways.
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He retains his belief

that the woman has a penis by constructing a substitute for that missing organ. He appoints a substitute, which inherits the interest formerly directed to the female genitals. And that substitute, as we already know, is the fetish, which is both a memorial to the horror of castration and a protection against it. What sorts of objects are adopted to assume such a mighty and contradictory task? Freud tells us that the objects chosen to be substitutes for the absent female penis are not, as we might expect, always or usually symbols of the penis. It would seem that the same process that arrests memory in traumatic amnesia is operative in the choice of fetish. The little boy’s interest comes to a halt at the halfway mark. The last impression before the traumatic moment becomes the fetish: “Thus the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish to the circumstance that the inquisitive little boy peered at the woman’s genitals from her legs up.”
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Fur and velvet, which represent the pubic hair that covers the genitals, are also favored fetishes. Similarly, pieces of underclothing crystallize the last moment that the woman could still be regarded as phallic. At this point in his explanation, Freud drops the discussion of the childhood origins of fetishism and dashes off to a new topic; something that had been of theoretical interest to him for a long time. He was employing the topic of fetishism to take him toward a more satisfactory explanation of the difference between neurosis and psychosis. When he wrote
The Ego and the Id
in 1920, he had thought that in neurosis, the ego suppresses a piece of the id, whereas in psychoses the id suppresses a piece of reality. But now, seven years later, he realizes there is another possible solution. Freud begins to explore the possibil- ity that a person could simultaneously avow a piece of reality but also disavow it. In connection with this new theoretical possibility Freud brings in two