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of castration at the sight of a female genital.” 4
    The fourth and fifth pages are taken up with the exploration of some typ- ical fetishes and one man’s unique fetish of an athletic supporter. The entire last page is given over to men’s destructive impulses directed toward the bodies of women. Apparently these fetishists can only appease their castration fears, when they are actively engaged in mutilating parts of a woman’s body, or parts of her clothing, which might be snipped off and kept on hand for future sexual activities, or, at the very least, as with footbinding, obsessed with worshipping a body part that has already been mutilated. And, the coup de grace, Freud’s final statement about the anatomical difference between the male and female sexes, will turn out to be as horrifying as the “memorial to the horror of castration.” At the bottom of page six, Freud drives home what he has been saying with a memorable concluding sentence, a memo- rial, as it were, to the castrations he has been recounting: “In conclusion we may say that the normal prototype of fetishes is a man’s penis, just as the normal prototype of inferior organs is a woman’s real small penis, the clitoris.” 5
    The characters Freud evokes to illustrate his theory of fetishism are a prototypical little boy who presumably, somehow or other, catches a sight of his mother’s “castrated” genitals; two young men, analytic patients of Freud whose fathers died when the young men were children; and four more adult males—a man whose fetish was the shine on a woman’s nose, the gentleman whose fetish was an athletic support belt, and another prototype, a coupeur des nattes , a braid-cutter, and finally, a variant of braid cutting that afflicted an entire society—men who endorsed the Chinese custom of mutilating the female foot and then revered it as a fetish.
    In the background, given full attention in the first paragraph, are a whole host of anonymous males, most of whom were at one time or another in analysis with Freud. Though each of these analytic patients recognized the abnormality of his fetish, he did not suffer from using it, or see it as a symp- tom worth analyzing. In fact the patients were quite satisfied with it, sometimes even praising “the way in which it eases their erotic life.” 6
    The fears of the female body, and the mutilations that men sometimes inflict on women’s bodies to counteract these fears, are not figments of Freud’s imagination. Many men do fear the female body and they do some- times participate in the mutilation of women’s bodies in order to alleviate this fear. However, the manner in which Freud puts his argument together, and his unrelenting attack on the so-called castrated female genitals, reveal some of his own destructive aggression toward the female body.
    This time, as I re-read “Fetishim,” once again my insights into the fetishism strategy have given me a better sense of what was troubling Freud’s heart, body, and soul at the time he wrote it. Indeed, now I must wonder at my earlier shrinking away from some facts that I could have registered more consciously much earlier. What I must have been aware of long ago, what I must have known but did not want to know and therefore disavowed, was all the information about the emotional and physical “castrations” that had befallen Freud prior to his writing “Fetishism.”
    Four years before his sudden impulse to write “Fetishism,” Freud had been struck down by the gods twice, one bolt right after the other; in fact, almost simultaneously. The first blow, in April of 1923, would be bringing him the first of thirty-four operations on his cancerous jaw, the placement of a prosthesis in his mouth that made it almost impossible to speak or hear, and sixteen years of nearly unbearable physical pain. The second blow, the death of his grandson, killed his enjoyment of life and was experienced by Freud as far more unbearable than his