Cultures of Fetishism by Louise J. Kaplan Read Free Book Online

became almost entirely deaf on that side. It was the side next to his patients, so the position of his couch and chair had to be reversed. 21

    Freud’s inability to give up smoking caused further irritation to his mouth and encouraged new leukoplakia, which then had a tendency to proliferate. Soon after the creation of prosthesis number two, Freud writes to a friend in Germany, “I want to thank you again for sending me those good cigars—150 of them. . . . Since it is not my intention to forgo this source of gratification for the short remainder of my life, please take any future opportunity you have to send me additional supplies.” 22
    From 1926 until his death, there was an “endless cycle of leukoplakia, proliferation and pre-cancerous lesions. Each of them had to be treated surgically by excision, electrocoagulation, or a combination of both.” 23
    A year after his first surgery, Freud had written to his colleague, Karl Abraham, “You must make a real effort to put yourself in my position if you are not to feel ill-disposed toward me.” 24 Those words kept reverberating in my mind as I grappled with the motives underlying Freud’s descent to destructive mysogenism in “Fetishism.” As I put myself in Freud’s place I felt enormous sympathy for him and could appreciate how his physical and emo- tional torments might have influenced the crudely aggressive tone of the 1927 “Fetishism.”
    In a letter to Lou Andrea-Salome written on the occasion of his sixty eighth birthday, two years before “Fetishism,” Freud commented on the “crust of indifference that was slowly creeping up around me; a fact I state without complaining. It is a natural development, a way of beginning to be inorganic. The ‘detachment of old age’ I think it is called.” 25 And then in his next sen- tence, where he attempts to explain the underlying cause of his detachment and indifference, Freud arrives at the crux of what I am describing as a “ gradual descent from a discourse of eroticism to a discourse of bodily mutilation and destruction .” Freud tells Salome, “It must be connected with the decisive crises in the relationship between the two instincts stipulated by me.” 26 Since he had several years earlier written Beyond the Pleasure Principle , a revolutionary monograph on manifestations of the death instinct, we can infer that he was referring to the inability of Eros, the life instinct, to tame and modulate the furies of Thanatos, the death instinct.

    I am proposing that the catastrophic loss of Heinerle, and the surgeries and ensuing horrors performed on Freud’s mouth, those two simultaneous “cas- trations” that continued to plague Freud during the four years preceding the writing of “Fetishism,” foreshadowed and precipitated the castrations executed in that paper. Even if it were possible to discount the death of little Heinz, the surgical procedures alone would provide context enough for Freud’s emphasis on “the horror of castration,” and his incongruously nonchalant presentations of the mutilations performed by men on the bodies of women. Perhaps the horrors that had befallen him might even have something to do with his con- fusing a fantasy about the female genitals with their reality. His reference to the clitoris as an inferior penis, a real small penis ( itals mine), demonstrates this confusion between fantasy and realty that pervades “Fetishism.” Another example is Freud’s habit of referring to female “castration,” another fantasy about the female genitals that he writes about as if it were a real mutilation.
    Plausible as my proposal may be, we should pursue further inquiries in order to have confidence in its validity. Had Freud approached the question of fetishism and female sexuality differently before the calamities that befell him in 1923? Had something fundamental changed in the way Freud went about pursuing his studies? And if so, what was the nature of that change?
    Since