Volume 1

Sexual aberrations; the phenomena of fetishism in relation to sex : Authorized English version from the 1st German ed / by S. Parker.

  • Wilhelm Stekel
Date:
[1930]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sexual aberrations; the phenomena of fetishism in relation to sex : Authorized English version from the 1st German ed / by S. Parker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    homosexuality and the fears of woman he retreats into a para- pathia; he fixates upon a symbol. He is also subject to those curious sleeplike and dream-states which we stressed in our discussion of infantilism and impulsive conduct. His split personality is fairly distinct, but it has not reached the stage of epileptiform seizures. This case presents the interesting feature of the displacement of the paraphilia from the foot to the neck. That is somewhat analogous to Havelock Ellis’s classical case in which the com- pression of the throat was as gratifying as the compression of the phallus. It is most certain that sadistic-criminal phantasies, of which the patient has no conscious knowledge, play a consid- erable role in this mechanism. Is it, after all, possible that the sadistic, the actively criminal, attitude of fetishists may be the reason why we see so few female fetish lovers? Mrs. H. Hug-Hellmuth has put such a case of female shoe fetishism on record.5 Case 46. This case concerns the daughter of a general who from her youth has manifested a special attraction for the shiny riding boots of her father. “A man clad in boots and sitting atop a horse is the only man.” She rejected divers suitors and finally engaged herself to a lieutenant thirty years her senior (father imago). She was deaf to all the arguments of her family and in- variably countered with praise of his attractive feet (riding boots). Her fiance died before she married and she chose in his place a strikingly ugly old major just because he wore very high riding boots. She is fatally infatuated with his charming boots and any civilian in his “run down” low shoes is no man at all in her eyes. “One can get the shivers at the sight of riding boots and yet love them, too,” she says. The marriage, of course, was a failure. Perhaps because she is frigid. She advised a girl friend of hers not to marry because naked feet are ugly. A man with his feet naked is a gruesome sight. “I shudder even at the thought of the great toe [manifestly a phallic symbol in her mind]. And the nails that are crippled and crooked, and the little toe which cannot grow, it is all a frightful sight for me.” She herself preferred to wear high shoes because of the virile and erect appearance it gave her and also because of the pleasant sensation of being tightly laced in. High shoes are charmingly decent because they clothe the form of the calf, but leather puttees and calf braces only ac-