Evan's Four Questions

Fetishism: "it [the fetish] remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a safeguard against it" (2). Given the way that Freud describes the fetish as forming from a kind of instinctual or survivalist need, I couldn't help but wonder how this might help characterize other fetishistic creations. Is the act of gift giving perhaps a response to a fear of isolation, or the fetish of money perhaps a response to the impermanence of material wealth in that it fixes it to an unchanging solid number?

Sexual Aberrations: "A certain degree of fetishism is thus habitually present in normal love..." (20). Freud glosses over this "normal" fetishism and uses is primarily to contrast with the aberrant sort, but I wonder not simply about how this fetish comes about, but how this fetish is received in the process of "normal" love. With the stigma that becomes associated with the aberrants and so their fetishes, fetishism has, if anything, become a fetish itself for abnormality. How does the "normal" lover relate to his or her fetish, and what does the partner make of someone else's fetish. This seems to me more inherently an anthropological than a psychiatric question but one that interests me nonetheless.

Infantile sexuality: "it [infantile sexuality] attaches itself to one of the vial somatic functions; it has as yet no sexual object" (48). It is interesting to me that there seems to be a sense that a return to infantile sexuality (auto-eroticism and objectless, fetishistic pleasure) are identified as the abnormal or as the fetishizing. Just by Freud's analogizing between sexuality and all other basic somatic functions, it seems increasingly strange that this particular one of sexuality needs to fetishize personal needs with some other object. How strange too that this object must be another agent who fetishizes their own somatic needs. I guess my question would be why is it natural that sexuality be fetishized externally? Just that that's how biology works?

Transformation of Puberty: "the eye is perhaps the zone most remote from the sexual object" (75). I was intrigued by this idea that the eye could be seen (no pun intended) as on the same level as other erotogenic zones. What is interesting about the eye is that its only stimulation comes in imagining the touch (this is a completely unqualified claim, I'm just asserting that here). It seems as though the eye imagines the touch imagines the.... eventually ending in sexual fulfillment. If we can establish this progression then, where does it start? My question here would be what is the most preliminary and anticipatory stage of sexual gratification? Is it the eye? Or can we go further and say that some unknowable part of the mind imagines first what the eye will see? Where is the sex-drive, in other words.