Baddolly’s Blog

n 1905, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud offered one theory to account for this behavior. In his view, the fetish originated with the male child’s horror of female castration. Confronted with the mother’s lack of a penis, the child represses this lack and finds some object to stand in for and substitute for the missing penis, thus relieving the anxiety and restoring in a displaced way) the erotic attachment to the female. The act involves not only finding a substitute object, but also a subsequent act of forgetting the act of substitution. For Freud, the fetish is a kind of creative denial, a sort of magical thinking that helps the fetishist ward off anxiety and restore a sense of well-being, all the while producing a kind of amnesia. Of course, this theory does not really help explain why some men become sexual fetishists and others do not. Nor does it explain how or why a woman might develop a fetish. (The French psychoanalyst Lacan added some interesting twists in explicating this theory, but since his theories are not widely known outside of academia, I won’t pursue them here.)

Freudian Model: “For Freud, fetishism implies both the recognition and the disavowal of reality and the constitution of a substitute.” (Sarah Kofman)

He initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party. by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. hans bellmer