Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Fetishism and anxiety : a test of some psychodynamic hypotheses.
AU - Wilson, Andrew
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - A computer-assisted content analysis of a corpus of 676 German-language foot, shoe, and boot fetish fantasies using the Dresdner Angstwörterbuch demonstrated an elevated rate of anxiety themes when compared with a broad-based general corpus containing 500 samples of published written German. This lends some support to the psychodynamic theory that fetishism has its roots in anxiety. More specifically, rates of mutilation (i.e. castration) anxiety themes were significantly higher in the fetish texts than in the control texts, but no significant difference was detected between the two sets of texts in relation to separation anxiety. This finding seems to support the traditional Freudian theory of fetishism, as opposed to the theories of the object-relations school; however, a phrasal analysis of the corpus also supports a modification of the Freudian theory, in that the woman may be the fetishist's perceived agent of castration rather than its original victim.
AB - A computer-assisted content analysis of a corpus of 676 German-language foot, shoe, and boot fetish fantasies using the Dresdner Angstwörterbuch demonstrated an elevated rate of anxiety themes when compared with a broad-based general corpus containing 500 samples of published written German. This lends some support to the psychodynamic theory that fetishism has its roots in anxiety. More specifically, rates of mutilation (i.e. castration) anxiety themes were significantly higher in the fetish texts than in the control texts, but no significant difference was detected between the two sets of texts in relation to separation anxiety. This finding seems to support the traditional Freudian theory of fetishism, as opposed to the theories of the object-relations school; however, a phrasal analysis of the corpus also supports a modification of the Freudian theory, in that the woman may be the fetishist's perceived agent of castration rather than its original victim.
KW - fetishism
KW - psychoanalysis
KW - castration anxiety
KW - mutilation anxiety
KW - separation anxiety
KW - computer-assisted content analysis
KW - Dresdner Angstwörterbuch
KW - corpus linguistics
M3 - Journal article
VL - 4
SP - 135
EP - 143
JO - Empirical Text and Culture Research
JF - Empirical Text and Culture Research
SN - 1617-8912
ER -