Neo-fetishism: towards an epistemological hybrid at the crossroads between psychoanalysis and the social sciences 

Article originally published in Studies in gender and sexualities

By Samuel Dock, PhD

Abstract: In this article[1], the author discusses the evolution of the concept of fetishism and calls attention to its epistemological lineage, where group and individual phenomena combine, and to its heuristic and methodological vocation. After this historical overview, he emphasizes Bernard Chervet’s observation that Freudian psychoanalysis has focused too much on the anti-traumatic function and the erogenous function of the fetish object, and points to the cessation of meta-psychological research on this theme. He explores the political stakes of the disappearance of fetishism from the clinical field under the cover of the “full elucidation” that Freud claimed to have reached. He presents the concept of “neo-fetishism” developed by the anthropologist Philippe Rigaut, the result of field work at the epicenter of new erotic cultures, which goes against the vanishing of fetishism in psychoanalysis. The author notes the importance of this putting the concept of fetishism back into play of and how it fits in to contemporary life, at the same time defining the limits of the social approach. He suggests that researchers take part in a transdisciplinary dialogue about fetishism and that psychoanalysts confront their dogmatic representations with live observation anchored in the actuality of current sexual practices. 

Keywords: Fetishism, perversion, fetish, psychanalysis, anthropology

An epistemological compass 

Since the second half of the 19th century, the concept of fetishism has been loaded with a set of significations that have made it a fundamental category in the areas of religious anthropology, political economy, and sexual life. It has helped bring about profound changes in the disciplines that have taken it up, extrapolating meaning from it while assimilating it into their field as a way of approaching the phenomena they wish to study. The first discipline to define it was anthropology; the concept did not exist until Charles de Brosses gave it a name in 1760[2]. According to Alfonzo Maurizio Iacono, it is extremely rare for the same term to enter and reinvent itself in three distinct disciplines simultaneously, while always confronting the observer with “a way of reflecting upon a fundamental philosophical problem: that of self and other” (Iacono, 1992, p. 14). A fetish function is composed of a certain number of invariables and these enable the concept to retain its relevance and consistency across disciplines: “although animist ritual, commercial exchange, and sexual enjoyment differ in the nature of their objects, it must be admitted that the different fetishes specific to these objects nevertheless share the same magical determination: over-valuation of desires, belief in the omnipotence of thought, and overestimation of the imaginary power of wishes are what determine the magical function we find at the root of superstition, capitalism and love” (Ribettes,  1999, p. 24).

The concept of fetishism will still play the role of an epistemological operator for Freud, who used it to free psychoanalysis from Binet’s associationist conception[3], thus making a definitive break with sexology, and also to promote, against the medical omnipotence of the time, the specific character of the metapsychological approach to “sexual perversions”, of which fetishism will from the outset seem to be the paradigm.

Freud first mentions fetishism in 1905, classifying it among sexual aberrations (Freud, 1905). Fetishism is the archetype of these since it figures, metaphorizes and embodies the process by which an “object” comes to be “overestimated” and to “deviate” from the “normal” sexual aim. No other aberration embodies better than fetishism the fixation-regression proper to the dynamics of perversion.[4] In 1909, at the Vienna Society of Physicians, Freud will speak of foot and shoe fetishism (Freud, 1909, p. 421-439). Also in 1909, he will report the case of Little Hans, in which he makes a connection between phobia and the question of whether or not the mother’s penis exists. Here he introduces the neurotic “disavowal” of the difference between the sexes (Freud, 1909, p. 93-198). The following year he will take this further, publishing Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (Freud, 1910), in which he will describe the fantasy of the phallic mother. Though he never mentions fetishism in the two last texts, they are nevertheless essential important steps in the creation of the conceptual framework which fetishism belongs to, and many authors, not least Lacan, will make it the main axiom of their theory of fetishism. In 1927, Freud describes a man’s fetishizing of “a certain shine on the nose”(Freud, 1927, p. 133) that he claims to see in some women. Fetishism becomes the operation by which a subject “guards himself” against the horror of his own castration by providing the mother with an imaginary phallus, the fetish. In 1938, Freud makes a taxonomic distinction between neurosis, psychosis, and perversion (Freud, 1938). He points out the splitting through which the fetishist both acknowledges and disavows female castration. While he will admit at the end of his life that a great many of the concepts he developed remain to be explored, he will consider that he has “fully elucidated” fetishism. This supposed victory is theoretically based on the analogy between the fetish object and the phallus, and clinically based on the repetitiveness of the scenario created around an object that is circumscribed in space and time, the unassailable support of an enjoyment that disavows otherness just as it disavows the experience of lack figured by castration. From a methodological point of view, it should be pointed out that Freud’s writing, unlike anthropological and economic texts, gives very little attention to the choice of fetish object, preferring to focus on the belief which makes it into a privileged artefact. Freud had identified two main functions of fetishism that give the chosen object two different but complementary purposes:

  • An anti-traumatic function, through its ability to counter the threat of castration, limit perception and stave off the return of anxiety when confronted with the female sex. The purpose is then counter-phobic (or, according to some authors, transitional or counter-depressive);
  • An erotic function, as it enables or facilitates the relation with the other and orgasm. The purpose is erogenous.

       In an article devoted to fetishism, Bernard Chervet observes that psychoanalysts who wish to pursue research on this subject have shown a clear preference for one or the other direction in their work (Chervet, 2012). While the fetish is always located at the intersection of the individual and the group, psychoanalysis focuses on the uniqueness of the subject. Psychoanalytical studies, of which there were not many, did not explore the group valence of the fetish, and, in 1970, Alfred Adler will even go so far as to express a stunning reversal of the situation: “fetishism has lost any right to a place in current anthropological theories” (Adler, 1970, p. 149). Is this still the case?

The extinction of clinical material 

       In 2010, a book was published presenting research on fetishism by several eminent psychoanalysts (Bouchet-Kervella, Bouhsira, & Janin-Oudinot, 2012). With the exception of already-old texts by Freud and Glover[5] republished in this volume, none of the texts in this collection presented any clinical case illustrating fetishistic behavior. One of the patients we encounter in this book is a homosexual whose fetish is “backroom” sex. Another happens to be an analysand in whom the author detects a fetishistic transference bond. Both cases are far removed from the imperious use of an object for sexual ends that is the very essence of fetishism. I wonder about the signification of this clinical lacuna. Have fetishists disappeared? Have they stopped seeking professional help? For that matter, did they ever seek it? We have long taken comfort from the maxim that says “The pervert is the one who doesn’t seek professional help”, even more so in the case of the fetishist enamored of a magical object he has no desire to give up since it seems to fulfill him and help him overcome his psychic conflicts. However, a number of analysts, led by Joyce MacDougall (1978), have shown that this is certainly not the case, and that the many fetishists in analysis are evidently capable of requesting psychoanalysis and investing the psychoanalytic setting. 

Laurie Laufer forcefully raises the question: “One might wonder why today’s psychoanalysts have left the issues of sexuality and sexual practices to sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, when the question of the sexual belongs to the field of psychoanalysis? It seems that the sexuality conceived of by Freudian theory is now approached only through psychopathological categories and their normalization. Since the seventies, psychoanalysis has abandoned its own turf to social construction theories of sexuality.” (2012, p. 122) She cites research in anthropology, sociology, and epistemology offering numerous studies, from work on erotic variations, sexual and gender identities, to studies that have contributed to the historicization of sexuality.

Within a broader perspective, the outcomes of fetishism, perversion, and sexuality ate linked, as Lantéri-Laura shows when he describes the process through which Freud produced an original discourse in 1905, breaking with the positivism of his time, then distanced himself (as his self-proclaimed successors would even further) from this approach to the subject in favor of rigid exegesis and clinical extrapolations: “It was assumed that clinical work had been completed and there was nothing more to be learned from it: once the observation of facts had been finished, psychiatric discourse would no longer focus on phenomena but on the theories that could be developed from them, and knowledge would not deal with the object, but with the concept of that object” (Lantéri-Laura, 2012 p. 128). He adds: “though the notion of perversion, the multiplicity of its forms and its historical evolution, largely come from the social conditions of knowledge production in this field.”  (Lantéri-Laura, 2012, p. 5) Moreover, he speaks of the “epistemological primacy” of fetishism, and it seems impossible to ignore the cultural, social, scientific, and legal factors that can influence it. From a psychoanalytical point of view, this may mean that we must start by acknowledging that the subject is never fully separated from the surrounding environment, since it is in a space outside his own psyche that he will first find the objects he invests, the figuration of his fantasies, even if it is only in the imaginary register.   

In the absence of clinical work, the concept of fetishism can only be used only for the purpose of pathological nomenclature and exclusion. Perversion appears as a territory, the territory of the pathological, with fetishism as its border. Foucault was right to say that “in the psychiatrization of perversions, sex has been related to biological functions and to an anatomopathological-physiological apparatus that gives it ‘meaning’, that is, a purpose; but it is also referred to an instinct which, through its own development and according to the objects it might attach to, makes possible the appearance of perverse behaviors, and makes their genesis intelligible; thus ‘sex’ is defined as an intertwining of function and instinct, of purpose and signification; and in this form it is manifested better than anywhere else, in the model-perversion, this “fetishism” that since at least 1877 has served as a guideline for the analysis of all other deviations, for in it we can clearly read the instinct’s fixation on an object in the mode of historical adherence or biological inadequacy”(Foucault, 1976, p. 203). A theory that ascribes an individual’s erotic practice to a biological model, when it is first and foremost the historical context that reveals how it is constituted, is a theory that reifies its subject, a fetishistic theory: psychoanalysis must be careful that it does not itself become perverted. The fetish object is always hovering at the confluence of the individual and the societal, an individual history and a civilizational framework involving both cultural and industrial forces. It seems impossible to relegate these signs of the times to the limbo of a radical and timeless otherness unworthy of consideration. As Merleau-Ponty asserts: “every historical object is a fetish” (Merleau-Ponty, 1988, p. 262), and every perception, of any object, of any phenomenon, always implies a certain fetishism, since elaborating it involves the bringing together of group and individual acquisitions.  

A neo-fetishism

It is the works of the anthropologist Philippe Rigaut that are most focused on the concept of fetishism. He describes what he calls the “Fetish” scene, a postmodern avatar of fetishism: “The term Fetish began to come into general use at the turn of the 1980s/1990s, initially as a replacement for the term S&M, which was thought to be too open to public reprobation and possibly hostile questioning (in particular by law enforcement). It gradually took on a meaning of its own and now refers to a type of eroticism which, while it maintains strong ties with hardcore sexualities, also draws from other sources, and which above all gives a prominent place to the imaginary aspect and to theatricality. Classic fetishism and classic S&M with their panoply of thigh-high boots, corsets, furs and other characteristic accessories give way to a Fetish world in which cultural heresies meet, informing and reinventing each other; these heresies are not all connected to the world of extreme sex, but have in common with it that they are situated in the register of transgression, of disquiet, of the mixing of discomfort and attraction.” (Rigaut, 2004, p. 119)

A certain kind of psychoanalysis still has a tendency to find perversion in regression and fixation to a partial object, implying an erotic scenario that is either immutable, or inflexible and not given to variations, eminently stiff in its enactment; moreover, our discipline frequently points to the fetishist’s exclusive relationship with his object – a fundamental requirement for the accomplishment of the sexual act. However, the Fetish scene in the writings of sociologists seems first of all to contradict this representation or at least to present some opposing behaviors, since it does appear to result from a plurality of very diverse influences, and is thus characterized by flexibility and permeability. Though S&M is one component of it, science fiction, the gothic, Punk and “Dark” imageries, Heroic Fantasy, mangas, television series, and, of course, the Queer Scene and so many other cultural matrices also belong to the infinite and constantly evolving list of its fundamental characteristics. It is more than a fetishism, constructed according to old taxonomies; rather, it is a neo-fetishism that “enables the interactive fusion between the world of non-normative sex and that of cultures referred to as alternative or parallel. Through it, erotic forms hitherto doomed to secrecy and to pornographic repetitiveness can gain access to a more sophisticated creative dimension, one characterized by hybridization” (Rigaut, 2004, p. 120). It is the hybridization of strange combinations which are like portals to parallel dimensions, from which futuristic samurai, insectile creatures wearing gas masks, baroque Valkyries, and strange rubber dolls come forth. Fetishism no longer appears to be just the worship of an out-of-bounds artefact from which no enjoyment can be derived, but as a tool that enables one to work on a certain self-image within a living and perpetually growing community. The subject fuses with his fetish, ego with alter-ego. In latex, one can mold, sculpt, and trim an ideal representation of oneself (or a representation that perhaps conforms more to one’s private phantasmagoria), which is presented to a group in which the subject is trying to find his place, through either identification or confrontation. The Fetlife[6] site mentioned by Philippe Rigaut has over 20 million members, and there are many others, some generalist, others specializing in a particular kind of fetish, whether one is a fan of neoprene, “Furries” [7], feet… Psychoanalytic research on neo-fetishism should certainly be focusing more on this inflation of a transcendent and imminent fetishism before anything else, on the “success” of this multifaceted conduct, more than on transmutations of it. While published studies get bogged down in exegesis, new fetishist groups are springing up as fast as the practices they are devoted to and the objects that the erotic industry makes available and keeps renewing, satisfying demand while creating need. These groups may be very different from one another, but all of them show a willingness to enable conviviality, to bring together a set of representations that extend well beyond the register of the sexual: it is a whole way of life, a way of being. 

The fetishist no longer experiences his sexuality in solitude but as part of communities that he can identify with, and within which he can have exchanges without the goal necessarily being a sex act. Certainly, fetishistic experiences and the fetish itself can be subjects of these exchanges, but other themes may arise that have more to do with the professional sphere, affective life, leisure activities, and so on.

The internet creates more possibilities for exchange, between BDSM and the underground territories that inspire contemporary fetishism. The fetish explodes and diffracts, like a boundless multiverse. Philippe Rigaut says that the creation of this network allows for an opening, a passage between the “various cultural heresies from which develop the most varied stylistic amalgams and reinventions” (Rigaut, 2004, p. 97). In this usage, fetishism no longer corresponds to a sexual practice alone but to an engagement of “identity” that should be understood as a possible path to subjectivation: “Rather curiously, the term that initially referred to a process of metonymic reduction of sexual desire now encompasses a particularly diverse set of practices, attitudes and aesthetic imagination, some of which, moreover, ultimately have only a distant kinship with the field of sexual perversion” (Rigaut, 2004, p. 66). He thinks that what really characterizes these neo-fetishist practices is both the extremely wide range of endogenous practices, atmospheres, and representations it covers, and the desire to create a convivial place. Nowadays, being a fetishist no longer implies living out one’s practices in a topography outside of the social sphere; it means participating in a communal life that is no longer just virtual. 

Philippe Rigaut makes a sharp distinction been S&M (sadomasochism) and BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Submission, Masochism). “As for the territory of humiliation, it is revealed to be all the more complex in that it puts into play a theatrical and conceptual dimension which transcends in a sense the carnal dimension of S&M games. It is the place where an eroticism that could be called D&S (Domination/Discipline, Submission) can be created. Among the initiated, one now speaks of BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Submission, Masochism) and of S&M fetishists, to describe a whole array of rituals, scenarios, and atmospheres that contribute to the theatricalization of the erotic relations between a dominator/trix and a submissive, characterized by both a (more or less manifest) wish for aesthetic sophistication and by a totally consensual mindset” (Rigaut, 2004, p. 78). While neo-fetishists may occasionally see themselves in acts of BDSM, they do not in any way accept the word “sadomasochist.” If insults are uttered during sexual intercourse, which is certainly not a rule, they are part of a process which, according to the sociologist, is that of symbolization, intellectualization and aestheticization. This means that BDSM behaviors generate and support a more sophisticated intersubjective relationship than the one that occurs in “physical sadomasochism,” which, as Robert Stoller has noted, “is more directed towards physical pain than towards master-slave scenes” (Stoller, 1991, pp. 223-247). Fetishism appears as the center of gravity of a constellation which it endows not only with heuristic power but also with an evocative force that will support the staging of the scene and engage the subject in an atmosphere that will be essential to any further carnal involvement. In sum, it appears to be the narrative pillar that marks a radical division between BDSM and sadomasochism, which receives a great deal of criticism from fetishists: “The whole difference between traditional sadomasochism and its S&M-fetishist version rests on the importance the latter gives to atmospheres, to the scripting of the sessions, to the quality of iconographic representations, as well as to the aesthetic of places and the originality of attire” (Rigaut, 2004, p. 95).  

The costume and the mood will enable an investment that is sensitive and sensual, a true elevation into a mental universe where, if fantasies can come true, it will be on the condition that the coherence of style and script be respected: “What is being sought is a complex form of psychic totality where the erotic drive takes part in a staging that removes its guilt, motivates it, and also displaces it into a territory that, in a way, transcends that of sexuality (…) The use of a panoply specifically adapted to the domination relationship highlights the playful dimension of this relationship while at the same time giving it a kind of intellectual validity” (Rigaut, 2004, p. 95). Ultimately, the most important thing is that fetishist manages to develop, through his fetishism, an atmosphere and a ritual that he feels are unique, individual and inimitable.

We should note that some theorists also speak of a “kink” scene[8], in which the fetish could find a place – but perhaps at the risk of disappearing into it and losing its specific characteristics?

Philippe Rigaut cites the many studies carried out by David Le Breton about corporeity (Le Breton, 1990), which are an indispensable resource about the subject, investigating both the figurability of the subject’s inner world, which the body enables by being a surface for inscription, and its potential, and surely paradoxical, repair through tattoos and scarification, what it feels. Nowadays, fetishism certainly infiltrates the imagery of everyday life, whether in the media or cultural productions, and provides the public with many new supports for identification, colors for repainting for repainting the image by oneself. However, even before fetishist experiences spread throughout the social sphere, the worship of “sensation” that is expressed in it contributes to a wider phenomenon of placing value on risk-taking and performance: the postmodern subject seeks, especially through certain sports, to engage in extreme physical behaviors, unlikely offshoots of fetishism. Such behaviors make it possible for their devotees to break with an existence that feels sanitized, sclerotic and isomorphic to them: “these deliberate activities are sought out by their enthusiasts as being a way of spicing up life in a society that is too safe” (Le Breton, 1990, p. 128).. So-called perverse sexualities represent so many side roads, refuges, place of exile from capitalist alienation: “Hardcore sexual practices may also be understood as an approach in which the actors enjoy their bodies in an extreme way with a purpose that transcends mere physical enjoyment to become a real quest for the self” (Le Breton, 1990, p. 133).

Many authors agree with this, such as Daniel Odier, who shows that the ever-more-intense search for carnal pleasure is how modern western society tries to escape from its “sensorial torpor” and “send shivers through an abandoned body”(Odier, 1999, p. 58). For Doris Kloster fetishism and BDSM conducts act as a bulwark against “the feeling of no longer having control over one’s life” engendered by the “accelerated mutations of our society’ and would thus be “attempts at self-reappropriation, through the performance of various acts of autoeroticism” (Kloster, 1995, p. 117).

Paradoxically, one must also discern in these sexualities the legacy of a society of hyper-consumption and Entertainment, in which even sexuality is a marketplace where everything is bought and sold, and which collides with more underground cultures. Nevertheless, for Rigaut, dissidence triumphs over submission: sexual liberation, which is, moreover, according to the sociologist, a “sexual revolution”, would in the end become proactive, by allowing the externalization of marginal sexual practices in the media. “The semantic evolution of the term fetishism marks this passage from individual perversion to the group creation of a diverse cultural scene, which is both clandestine and extroverted, moving and codified, unified by a shared attraction to the bizarre, to what shakes up, or in any case transgresses, all kinds of conformism” (Rigaut, 2004, p. 162). This reasoning leads to most fundamental sociological and anthropological argument: the change in the relation to the body, which “can only be a body that is crafted, a voluntary construction. It is the altar on which can be performed – in forms that are admittedly rather superficial in some people – a whole liturgy in which the subject takes full possession of his own  identity. (Rigaut, 2004, p. 164).

Psychanalysis as a necessary horizon

This research can be credited with giving a perfect description of contemporary neo-fetishism, showing its diverse cultural influences and socialization places, its multiple and continual evolutions, revealing it to have a flexibility and permeability that contradicts the traditional conception that we usually have of it in psychoanalysis; it also reveals its industrial sources and sheds light on the transformations of corporeity. Nevertheless, these proposals do invite some criticism and each raises some questions. 

First of all, fetishism is consistently subordinated to the BDSM sphere. I have in mind a patient, Edouard, a forty-five-year-old man who works in aviation and lives in Paris. He describes himself as having a latex fetish, even though he includes leather and silicon in his erotic imagination. This imaginary world operates in two directions. There is a visual dimension, Edouard’s body – this is perhaps the real fetish, becoming matter that he transforms with the help of masks, contact lenses, sophisticated body suits and other items derived from the world of cinematic special effects. There is a strong sensorial dimension, the aim of which is playful – even when it includes physical restraint, bodily fluids (urine, sweat), regulation of breathing; in the subject’s discourse, it sounds like caretaking and has little in common with the representations of BDSM presented by Philippe Rigaut. Here the analytical approach highlights the anti-traumatic valence of the fetish object and finds its signification by looking at the anamnesis of the subject, marked in very early childhood by the violence of his mother, who suffered from a psychiatric illness that was never diagnosed or treated. Indeed, through his fetishism, Edouard seems to recreate a safe and protective containing universe that he experiences not alone, but within the romantic relationship with his companion. The social approach helps to de-pathologize and de-psychoticize psychoanalytic representations of the fetishist subject: here, fetishism is not experienced as something cloistered and removed from any social bond, but in a dialogue with a fetishist community Edouard belongs to and which has served as a basis for a number of exchanges and convivial experiences that are not just about erotic life. On the other hand, psychoanalysis helps shed light on the subject’s subtle and unique journey without subordinating the individual to the group. Very different cultural supports, a variety of sexual practices, heterogenous modes of socialization: do all these behaviors come from the same psychic dynamic? Are they expressions of the same fantasies? Is there only one fetishism and only one fetishist subject? The metapsychological approach helps to restore uniqueness to every subject whereas anthropological and sociological mixing tends to downplay the most significant differences in order to emphasize systemic wholes in which individual desires fade away. As Julie Mazaleigue-Labaste writes: “Thus, clinical treatment of the subject is the only thing that makes it possible to state the truth of the act and to enable sharing among individuals”(Mazaleigue-Labaste, 2014, p. 13). And the relationship between this act, as language, and the gaze that the subject gives it and constructs for it is the first object of psychoanalysis.  

Philippe Rigaut writes: “Instruments of an ascetic eroticism in which what matters is more than the sexual itself; it is achieving an anatomical look stamped with the seal of constraint, of straightening-out (…) Corsets, high-heels, thigh-high boots, studded bracelets, hoods and latex body suits, form a sartorial apparatus which banishes ease, freedom, and lightness in favor of rigidity, and whose primary objective is to use costume and scenery to lend credibility to an erotic scenario based on feelings of authority and fear” (Rigaut, 2004, p. 75-77). Once again, what is said in the session helps to qualify this assertion and gain a better understanding of fetishist behaviors. I am reminded of Giulio, aged 36, who works in a restaurant in Paris. Giulio says that he fled conservative Italy at the end of his adolescence. He dreamed of making movies but did not succeed at this in France, although when he talks about his fetishism during the session, there is a narrativity that seem to be a vestige of his past ambition. Giulio fetishizes lycra and spandex, the materials that superhero costumes are made of. Superheroes are what he embodies and has his partners embody in a room that he transforms at leisure into a Hollywood film set. Unlike in the case of Edouard, what matters most is the story that will be told by the protagonists of the long-anticipated, well-planned scene, more than the sensorial and scopic aspects. While we must agree with Philippe Rigaut about the evocative power of costume as a support to the scenario, it is much harder to concur with his presentation of neo-fetishist ambitions regarding authority and fear. Giulio says that, after all the pitfalls he’s experienced in life, he feels the need to slow down and come back to himself. He sometimes feels like a robot, alienated by the work he does to earn money and survive, a job where he feels like a cog in a wheel, “trapped.” It is a trap from which he gets free in bed, through what he has constructed out of cardboard. Giulio’s fantasy is not so much about captivity as about emancipation, no so much about imprisoning the partner as about freeing the Other.

Moreover, the costume, the fetish object, is in no way merely accessory, as Philippe Rigaut would have it, since it is at the heart of the fiction Giulio writes, which goes beyond the sexual framework – contrary to the monolithic vision of a certain kind of psychoanalysis – and he puts uses it in his theatrical performances. This is also the case for Edouard who explained that he derived pleasure from going about his daily tasks while dressed in latex: “for some people, their gender is male or female; my gender is fetish” he says, leading us to consider that neo-fetishism not only as a sexual practice but as an identity. Identity and behaviors that, for Giulio as well, are part of a community released from the shackles of domination and submission. Once again, psychoanalysis enables us to retrace the destiny of this man whose mother died prematurely of cancer and who blames himself for not being able to save her. It also allows us to decipher the sensitive writing of a story that is first about the intimacy of the subject, to better understand what is born in the encounter between a person and an object, and to not reduce sexuality to a dissident political act, a militant movement in the erotic environment of an oppressive system. As Pierre-Henri Castel notes: “Nothing could be further from the truth than the belief that the pervert is constantly obliged to resuscitate ‘the norm’ in order to graft his ‘deviances’ on it. This scornful portrait of the pervert in miniature as someone who is only a subversive force, never a proactive one, a fierce defender of order (virtue, family, morality) because without it his infamies and vices would have no meaning, is a misunderstanding that should discarded.” (Castel, 2014, p. 128).

       The fetish, in true fetishism where the relation to the object is prioritized, as it is for Edouard and Giulio, is not a gadget on the night table, nor even a pillar without which the sexual scene, sadomasochistic or not,  would collapse; it is not the adjuvant without whom the narrative stumbles. No, it is the scene itself, the alpha and the omega; it is everything, the little thing that is enough, the sole reality in which the fetishist wants to evolve. For Rigaut, not only are all fetishes “accessories”, all accessories have the same value, the same importance, the same use. It seems necessary to differentiate between a fetish object as a utensil that is manipulable (literally, able to be handled), whose purpose is to complement or explore the body of oneself or the other, to aid arousal, and the fetish object as a surface covering the subject who abandons himself to it, and with which the subject seeks a more lasting communion, as symbiotic as possible. As Paul Denis insightfully writes, “The fetish isn’t a thing – it’s a system” (Denis, 1994, p. 139-150), and it is psychoanalysis that enables us to find meaning in this system which consecrates a specific object and not another. Explanations offered for the democratization of a certain kind of fetishistic culture are not enough to help us understand the genesis of fetishism at the individual level. The metamorphoses of the relation to the body that Rigaut points out in postmodern society have certainly played a part in the evolution of sexuality. However, it seems inadequate to reduce these major transformations – if indeed they are not re-actualizations of already recognized clinical phenomena – to the influence of the group; it also seems inadequate not to specify which psychical operations are in play in these variations on corporeity. Our society is evolving, and so is the body. Symptoms are evolving, too, since they enable everyone to take part in the social relation: that is, they enable “the subject to ‘come into’ the world, and to organize his unique way of relating. His symptoms are simply the subject’s response to (or indeed, rejection of) that in which he must nevertheless find a place: the fabric of society, with its demands and the specific logic which governs it. In short, if the deal changes, the response to it will change accordingly”  (Abelhauser, 2013, p. 336). The contemporary body can only embrace matter that reveals what it is. A body that when it is this pigment, that ink, no longer needs to have a sex. A body as language. Fetishism certainly represents one possible route to subjectivation, among others; so why is it that some people choose this route, and not the ones that lead through sports, tattoos, or body modifications? Once again, only psychoanalysis seems able to respond to the question left unanswered by the social sciences. For Jean-Louis Chassaing: “The fetish always has this dual aspect: its objective character, with its social, communal and historical aspect; and the fetish’s relation to the individual person”(Chassaing, 2007, p. 68 -74). No other concept should give rise to so much fruitful dialogue between academic disciplines, and no other concept so readily calls the attention of researchers in psychoanalysis to what is happening outside the closed doors of the psychoanalyst’s office, in the very movements of civilization. As Jacques André says: “Psychoanalysis maintains the atemporal character of unconscious processes with a serene pretention that has annoyed not a few people. This does not in any way mean that it is indifferent to the spirit of the times: the unconscious acts towards the cultural and historical context the way that the dream acts towards the preceding day: it draws material that it will use to construct its own reality, but this will never be simply in the image of what the world presents” (André, 2012, p. 8). In order to understand Giulio’s superhero worship and Edouard’s transhumanist fictions, it is necessary to pay attention to their world, to the times in which they are evolving. 

     Sociology allows for a particularly accurate description of group contexts and models, of social mechanisms and logics, until these falter on an individual scale. It also helps us to historicize the phenomena we observe and detect the ideological tenor of the concepts we use; it also keeps us from shutting the patients we are listening to up in their individual iterations, and helps us to consider them in their connections with others. But psychoanalysis prevents us from stopping at the gates of consciousness and making the subject our target, helping us to further explore the Human being, his inner world, and society itself, carried down into the cellars of his psyche. Let us hope that psychoanalysis can get back on the path without which there is no thought and no ethics: that of clinical work. 

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Samuel Dock is Doctor of Psychopathology and Psychoanalysis, Clinical psychologist and a writer. His first novel, l’Apocalypse de Jonathan [The Apocalypse of Jonathan] (Le Manuscrit, 2012) received both critical and popular acclaim. He has published two works with Marie-France Castarède (Le Nouveau Choc des Générations [The New Generation Shock], Plon 2015 and Le Nouveau Malaise dans la Civilisation [The New Civilization and Its Discontents], Plon 2017). In 2016, he interviewed Julia Kristeva for her memoir, Je me voyage (Fayard). He then published Punchlines des ados chez le psy [Teens’ punchlines with their shrink] (First, 2018) and Eloge Indocile de la psychanalyse [Undocile Praise of Psychoanalysis] (2019, Philippe Rey.) He regularly appears in the media to talk about the important issues of society. His most recent book, Les chemins de la thérapie [The Roads of Therapy] was published by Flammarion in 2022. 

[1] Translation from French by Elizabeth Kelly.

[2] Charles de Brosses defined it in 1760 in his Culte des dieux fétiches, using the term to designate the process by which indigenous peoples in so-called primitive societies use an object found in nature to worship ancestors and spirits: “I ask to be allowed to make habitual use of [the expression of fetishism]: & and although in its proper signification it refers particularly to the beliefs of Black Africans, I warn you that I plan to make use of it, too, to speak of any other nation, where objects of worship are animals or inanimate objects that have been divinized; sometimes even to talk about certain peoples for whom objects of this kind are not so much gods in the proper sense as things endowed with divine virtue, oracles, amulets, and protective talismans.” Brosses, de C. (1860). “Du culte des dieux fétiches”, Corpus des œuvres de philosophie, Paris, Fayard, 1988, pp. 10-11.

[3] Binet’s sexological and behavioral approach held that fetishism was born in early childhood from an association between sensual pleasure and the sight of the object meant to become the fetish. Binet, A. (1888). Le fétichisme dans l’amour, Paris, Payot, 2000.

[4] As Patrick Guyomard reminds us: “Freud linked perversion to the order of the drives. The perverse polymorph attitude is the acknowledgement of drives and partial objects. In this sense, perversion is the norm. If it is masculine, it involves the genital, the difference between the sexes and not the diversity of drives. From the perspective of clinical thinking about perversion, we can gauge the importance and the stakes of debates in the psychoanalytic field about drives, desire, and the genital.” Guyomard, P. (2015). « La perversion comme fétiche », André, J., Chabert, C., & Coll, La perversion, encore, Paris, Puf, p. 24.

[5] Who, we should note, saw alcoholism as a fetishism, which shows how far some authors will denature the concept in order to “make their case”.

[6] https://fetlife.com is a social media platform that enables subscribers to exchange photos and post messages, like Facebook for fetishists. 

[7] A real cult has grown up around these famous “mascots”. 

[8] “By the expression ‘kinky sex’, I am mainly referring to practices such as sadomasochism (S&M), bondage and discipline, or fetishism.” Rubin, G. Surveiller et jouir, p. 132. Rubin makes a clear distinction between fetishism and kink :  “kink or fetishism”.