Page:Psychopathia Sexualis (tr. Chaddock, 1892).djvu/150

132 patient allowed himself to masturbate when excited by the sight of ladies’ shoes beset with nails in the window of a shoe-shop, and thus became a criminal. (Blanche, Archiv. de Neurologie, 1882, Nr. 22.)

Reference may be made here to a case of contrary sexuality, to be described later, in which the principal sexual interest was in the boots of male servants. The desire was to be trod upon by them.

From these cases it may be plainly seen that the shoe is the fetich of the masochist, and apparently because of the relation of the dressed female foot to the idea of being trod upon and other acts of humiliation. When, therefore, in other cases of shoe-fetichism, the female shoe appears alone as the excitant of sexual desire, one is justified in presuming that masochistic motives have remained latent. The idea of being trod upon, etc., remains in the depths of unconscious life, and the idea of the shoe alone, the means for such acts, rises into consciousness. Cases that are otherwise wholly inexplicable are thus sufficiently explained. Here one has to do with larvated masochism; and this may always be assumed as the unconscious motive, when, as occurs not exceptionally, the origin of the fetichism, from an association of ideas on the occasion of some particular event, can be proved, as in Cases 87 and 88.

Such cases of desire for ladies’ shoes, without conscious motive and without demonstrable origin, are really innumerable. Three cases are here given as examples:—