Erotic fetishism (Krafft-Ebing)

This is an excerpt of something I was reading ~ ‘Psychopathia Sexualis by R. von Krafft-Ebing.’

I must say all the talk of hair and nails reminds me of Donnie Pfaster – probably the scariest ‘monster’ on the X-files. In that he wasn’t a monster, he was just a regular old serial killer, with a thing about red hair. Unluckily for Scully.

Anyway, that’s perhaps totally irrelevant. Everything links to an X-files episode in my mind.

“Erotic fetishism is different; it finds its psychological motivation in the fact that physical or even psychological qualities of a person, indeed even mere objects that he uses and the like, become a fetish, in that they awaken powerful associative ideas to the total personality and in addition are always accentuated with a vivid sexual feeling of desire. Analogies with religious fetishism arise nonetheless, insofar as here too under certain circumstances very insignificant objects (bones, nails, hair, etc.) are the fetish and are associated with feelings of desire to the point of ecstasy.

[1] See Max Mueller, who derives the word “fetish” etymologically from factitius (artificial, insignificant thing).        

Regarding the development of healthy physiological love, it is likely that its seed can always be sought and found in a very individual fetish enchantment that the person of one sex exerts on one of the other sex.

The simplest is the case that the sight of a person of the other sex coincides in time with sensual arousal and this sight heightens the sensual arousal.

The emotional and optical impression join in an associative connection and this connection is solidified insofar as the recurring feeling awakens the optical memory image or the image (seeing it again) once again causes sexual arousal, perhaps to the point of orgasm and ejaculation (dream image).

In this case the total physical appearance acts as a fetish.

As Binet among others stresses, however, it can be even parts of the whole, mere qualities, both physical and even merely psychological qualities, that influence the person of the other sex as a fetish, in that the perception of them coincides with a (random) sexual arousal (or provokes one).

The fact that chance determines this psychological association, that the object of the fetish can be individually extremely unique, that the strangest sympathies (and conversely antipathies) arise from it, is a generally known fact of experience.

This physiological fact of fetishism explains the individual sympathies between men and women, the preferencing of a certain person above all others of the same sex. Since the fetish represents a very individual local symbol, it is understandable that it has only an individual effect. Since it is accentuated by extremely powerful feelings of desire, it leads to the overlooking of any defects of the love object (“love blinds”) and causes an exaltation that appears justified only individually, while appearing incomprehensible to other persons, in some circumstances even ridiculous. This explains the fact that the sober person cannot understand his infatuated fellow human being, while the latter worships his idol, make a true cult of him, inventing qualities for him that the love object himself does not possess, objectively speaking …

This explains the fact that loves appears sometimes as a passion, sometimes as a real psychological aberration, in which the unattainable seems attainable, the ugly beautiful, the profane exalted, and any other interest, any other duty seems to have disappeared.”