A man whose violent mother and sister fixation had kept him till forty-five away from all women and made him homosexual, felt extremely uneasy and slightly ashamed in the presence of tall blonde women, the mother and sister type. While he never enjoyed greatly the company of any woman, he felt more at ease with small brunettes.
In his case, blonde hair and a high stature had become strong antifetishes.
The Quest of the Fetish means then, in last analysis, the quest of safety. If fetishes are so closely linked with sexuality, it is mainly because a feeling of safety is one of the necessary conditions for sexual potency in the male and the female alike.
As soon as fear dominates, the pelvic regions are starved of blood, for the blood is then needed in other parts of the body, head and limbs, for fight or flight. Sexual impotence is the result. This is probably why in primitive races we often find the erect phallus used as a symbol of safety, as a primitive "fetish" vouchsafing imaginary safety and confidence.
This throws an interesting sidelight upon the real meaning of morbid fetishism. As I said in one of the preceding paragraphs, every neurotic feels inferior and seeks safety. The hair fetishist, for instance, is inferior in some respect or considers himself inferior, which is about the same and has the same consequences, as far as ultimate mental or physical results are concerned.
The normal hair fetishist seeks a woman whose hair will symbolise to him the safety he enjoyed close to his mother's hair. The abnormal fetishist will crave the possession of hair which alone will place him in turn in possession of safety, a condition in which his sexual cravings will be easily satisfied. Not feeling capable of conquering a woman, however, he will cut off some one's tresses, which will symbolise to him woman, and the safety enjoyed in woman's (his mother's) arms. In that fashion, he also gratifies his craving for the line of least effort. Unwilling to face the social, economic, biological responsibilities that go with the possession of a woman, he seeks in the fetish which he steals, an easy, selfish, unsocial form of gratification. That gratification is also a regression, for it leads him back to the autoerotic practices of childhood.
Attraction or Obsession. In the normal man, then, the fetish is an attraction, influencing his choice of a mate. In the abnormal man it becomes an obsession, the fetish at times becoming infinitely more important than the part of the body it suggests, at times causing the elimination of the sexual mate which it replaces entirely.
In the normal man, the fetish, being the bearer of pleasant memories from childhood days, facilitates one's adaption to a life partner. The abnormal individual, unwilling to part with his childhood ways, which were easier and safer, either demands that the life partner be the absolute image of the person from whom he acquired his fetishes or prefers one safe fetish to any life partner.
In the next chapter we shall see how mental and physical, real and symbolic fetishes are forced upon us by the various developments of the family romance which is always accompanied by a more or less marked family feud.