have done better to mention this most interesting group of aberrations
of the sexual impulse among the deviations in reference to the sexual
object, but we have deferred mention of these until we became acquainted
with the factor of sexual overestimation, upon which these
manifestations, connected with the relinquishing of the sexual aim,
depend.

The substitute for the sexual object is generally a part of the body but
little adapted for sexual purposes, such as the foot, or hair, or an
inanimate object which is in demonstrable relation with the sexual
person, and preferably with the sexuality of the same (fragments of
clothing, white underwear). This substitution is not unjustly compared
with the fetich in which the savage sees the embodiment of his god.

The transition to the cases of fetichism, with a renunciation of a
normal or of a perverted sexual aim, is formed by cases in which a
fetichistic determination is demanded in the sexual object if the sexual
aim is to be attained (definite color of hair, clothing, even physical
blemishes). No other variation of the sexual impulse verging on the
pathological claims our interest as much as this one, owing to the
peculiarity occasioned by its manifestations. A certain diminution in
the striving for the normal sexual aim may be presupposed in all these
cases (executive weakness of the sexual apparatus).[17] The connection
with the normal is occasioned by the psychologically necessary
overestimation of the sexual object, which inevitably encroaches upon
everything associatively related to it (sexual object). A certain degree
of such fetichism therefore regularly belong to the normal, especially
during those stages of wooing when the normal sexual aim seems
inaccessible or its realization deferred.