Page:Psychopathia Sexualis (tr. Chaddock, 1892).djvu/197

Rh and advised him to hang a shoe up over his bed, and look at it fixedly during coitus, at the same time imagining his wife to be a shoe. The patient became free from epileptic attacks, and potent so that he could have coitus about once a week. Too, his sexual excitation by women’s shoes grew less and less. (Hammond, “Sexual Impotence.”)

Following these two cases of shoe-fetichism, which apparently depend merely upon accidental association, and are not favored by any inner relation between the things themselves, is given the very strange case of a fetichist who was excited sexually only by the idea of a night-cap on the head of an ugly old woman; also a case arising apparently from merely accidental association:—

In this very peculiar case, the simultaneous coincidence of the first sexual excitation and an absolutely heterogeneous impression seems to have determined the association.

Hammond (op. cit.) also mentions a case of accidental associative fetichism that is quite as peculiar. A married man, aged 30, who, in other respects, was healthy, physically and mentally, is said to have suddenly lost his sexual power, after moving to another house, and to have regained it as soon as the furniture of the sleeping-room had been arranged as it was before.