"The terms "erotic fetish" and "sexual fetish" were first introduced by Alfred Binet......
If a sexual fetish causes significant psychosocial distress for the person or has detrimental effects on important areas of their life, it is diagnosable as a paraphilia in the DSM and the ICD.[2] Many people embrace their fetish rather than attempting treatment to rid themselves of it, especially in an age where they can easily find communities of like-minded people via the internet....
If a sexual fetish causes significant psychosocial distress for the person or has detrimental effects on important areas of their life, it is diagnosable as a paraphilia in the DSM and the ICD.[2] Many people embrace their fetish rather than attempting treatment to rid themselves of it, especially in an age where they can easily find communities of like-minded people via the internet...
The existential approach to mental disorders developed in the 1940s and influenced a view that fetishes had complex personal meanings beyond the general categories of psychoanalytical treatment.[citation needed] For instance, the Austrian neurologist and logotherapist Viktor Frankl once noted the case of a man with a sexual fetish involving, simultaneously, both frogs and glue.[...
Early psychology assumed that fetishism either is being conditioned or imprinted or the result of a strong emotional (possibly traumatic) or physical experience. Often, these experiences occurred in early childhood. For example, an individual who has been physically abused could either have a sexual obsession with intercourse, or they could be completely terrified by even the idea of being touched. ...
Alfred Binet suspected fetishism was the pathological result of associations. Accidentally simultaneous presentation of a sexual stimulus and an inanimate object, he argued, led to the object being permanently connected to sexual arousal.
The sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld followed another line of thought when he proposed his theory of partial attractiveness in 1920. According to his argument, sexual attractiveness never originates in a person as a whole but always is the product of the interaction of individual features. He stated that nearly everyone had special interests and thus suffered from a healthy kind of fetishism, while only detaching and overvaluing of a single feature resulted in pathological fetishism. Today, Hirschfeld's theory is often mentioned in the context of gender role specific behavior: females present sexual stimuli by highlighting body parts, clothes or accessories; males react to them.
Sigmund Freud believed that sexual fetishism in men derived from the unconscious fear of the mother's genitals, from men's universal fear of castration, and from a man's fantasy that his mother had had a penis but that it had been cut off. He did not discuss sexual fetishism in women.
In 1951, Donald Winnicott presented his theory of transitional objects and phenomena, according to which childish actions like thumb sucking and objects like cuddly toys are the source of manifold adult behavior, amongst many others fetishism...
Behaviorism traced fetishism back to classical conditioning and came up with numerous specialized theories. The common theme running through all of them is that sexual stimulus and the fetish object are presented simultaneously, causing them to be connected in the learning process. ...
The super stimulus theory stressed that fetishes could be the result of generalization. For example, it may only be shiny skin that arouses a person at first, but in time more common stimuli, such as shiny latex, may have the same effect. ...
Because classical conditioning seemed to be unable to explain how the conditioned behavior is kept alive over many years, without any repetition, some behaviorists came up with the theory that fetishism was the result of a special form of conditioning, called imprinting. Such conditioning happens during a specific time in early childhood in which sexual orientation is imprinted into the child's mind and remains there for the rest of his or her life.
Various neurologists pointed out that fetishism could be the result of neuronal cross links between neighboring regions in the human brain." (Wikipedia)