The Fetish in Nicole Krauss' Great House and in Clinical Practice

Abstract

The paper seeks to recast the idea of the fetish in relational terms. It uses Freud, Winnicott, attachment theory, and multiple self-state theory as background to understanding that fetishes are one response to devastating trauma. Fetish making—a creative effort to ward off threat, undo annihilating loss, and restore and maintain a sense of safety—is contextually and intersubjectively generated and supported. Further, the construction of a fetish in the analytic relationship represents a co-created enactment. Although Freud was “not able to explain” why some people react to the fright of castration by creating a fetish—through the process he termed “disavowal” (Freud, 1927)—I suggest here that contextual circumstances, including traumatic personal and social history and the analytic relationship, contribute to the creation and continuance of fetishes. The Nicole Krauss novel Great House and a clinical case illustrate my ideas.

Notes

¹Ramarchandran & Blakeslee (1998) suggested that fetishism may be the result of neuronal crosslinks between neighboring regions in the human brain. For example, the region processing sensory input from the feet lies immediately next to the region processing genital and sexual stimulation.

²Some contributions bearing on human connectivity that promotes mentalizing capacity include two different theories of intersubjectivity (Benjamin, 2004;Stolorow, Atwood, & Brandshaft, 1994) the idea of an Interpersonal Interpretive Mechanism (Fonagy et al., 2002), an evolutionary concept bearing on subjective connectivity, and terms like emotional resonance (Sander, 2002), emotional understanding (Orange, 1995), emotional attunement (Stern, 1985), contingent responsiveness (Beebe & Lachmann, 1998, 2002), rhythmicity and specificity (Sander, 2002), marked mirroring (Fonagy et al., 2002), dialogue (Buber & Buber Agassi, 1999), self- and interactive regulation (Beebe & Lachmann, 2002), moments of recognition (Benjamin, 2004, 2010), moments of meeting (Boston Change Process Study Group, 2010), present moments (Stern, 2004), connectfulness (Hastings, 2011), and Self-Realization (Wright, 2009). Similarly, relational theorists are attending to enactment in ballooning numbers, for example, Bromberg (2006), Benjamin (2010), Daniel N. Stern (2004), Donnel B. Stern (2010), Teicholz (2006), Weisel-Barth (2006, 2008).