‘Round About Fetishism With Louise J. Kaplan by Adolfo Fattori

photographs courtesy Adam Chilson
 
You devote an entire chapter of your book to the fetishist strategies found within the same American psychoanalytical establishment – an issue debated, although perhaps not in those terms, even in Italy. There’s a sort of self-reference in all of this, it seems a perverse version of the Mœbius’ ring that you mention about the relationship between internal and external body. A similar reasoning, in a more general way, is carried on by Fredric Jameson in his Postmodernism12 , about the fact that the reflection regarding the post-modernity is itself a postmodern phenomenon. Do you feel a relationship between the two phenomena?
Here I will say “Yes, you are right in pointing to the paradoxical Moebius ring twisting around a free flowing internal life in such a way as to bind it into the external rules of a psychoanalytic establishment that wishes to control and dominate this internal life.” Whereas, as we know, a true Moebius would become an organic part of that internal life and help to give it expression. In my chapter on psychoanalysis, I introduce this troubling situation by reviewing some of my earlier commentaries on fetishism. I begin by discussing how the sexual fetishist uses his fetish to subdue the erotic vitalities of his partner. “To the sexual fetishist, the lifeless, or nearly lifeless body is far preferable to a desiring body that might assert its own ambiguous energies.” In the conclusion to this introduction to psychoanalytic fetishism, I return to the previous chapter which is about the Archive Fever of biographers. “The writing of a biography is meant to bring to life the life story of a living or once living subject. However, all too often the archive fevers that plague that noble enterprise succeed in squelching those vitalities.” In summary. one could say that, all too often, enterprises that pose as giving life often prevent the life forces from expressing themselves. And this sad state of affairs, unfortunately is true of the formal psychoanalytic training given in most psychoanalytic institutes.

As I say (p.113 of  Falsi Idoli) The fetishistic structure of the training of psychoanalytic candidates brings out the irony in a most dramatic way. For, if ever a cultural endeavour had been devised to augment and sustain life, and triumph over the forces of death, it is psychoanalysis. And yet, the training of psychoanalists is conducted in an atmosphere designed to murder psychoanalytic creativity.
I then pose the question of how a process based on an ideal of free association can come to life in a process founded on law and order. According to the principles of the fetishism strategy, anything that threatens to be freely flowing and mobile must be bound. Even some staunch defenders of the free association process are often frightened of anything that might modify established psychoanalytic principles and therefore proclaim “We should try to keep what we already have - cultivate the land that has been cleared and guard against the return of the jungle and against corrosion13 .
As Derrida put it in his introduction to Archive Fever, there is a tension between the analyst’s investment in the “mercurial and flowing” energies of the analytic situation which allow the unforeseen, unknown and possibly errant vitalities of the patient’s innermost psychic reality to emerge, and the principles of law and order that are perpetuated in the psychoanalytic institutes.
We might ask, “What is it about the creative vitalities of the clinical situation that might be so frightening to the senior analysts responsible for the training of psychoanalytic candidates? In his essay “Thirty methods to destroy the creativity of psychoanalytic candidates14 .” Otto Kernberg proposed answer to this question, “Where there is a spark, there may develop a fire particularly when this spark appears in the middle of dead wood. Extinguish it before it is too late.” Kernberg, without knowing it, is stating the second principle of the fetishism strategy. Fetishism transforms ambiguity an uncertainty into something knowable and certain and in doing so snuffs out any sparks of creativity that might ignite the fires of rebellion15 . Near the conclusion of this chapter, I make a recommendation to psychoanalysts. I propose a method of keeping the process of analysis alive and moving, by inviting their attention to the third principle of the fetishism strategy.  Fetishism brings certain details into the foreground of experience in order to mask and disguise other features that are thus cast into the shadows and margins. For example, the powerful presence of the erotic surfaces disguises and covers over the absences that would otherwise remind us of something traumatic16 .”