Cultures of Fetishism

In her latest book, Dr. Louise Kaplan, author of the groundbreaking Female Perversions , explores the fetishism strategy, a psychological defense that aims to tame, subdue, and if necessary, murder human vitalities. Through an exploration of such cultural phenomena as footbinding, reality television, and the construction of robots, Kaplan demonstrates how, in a technology-driven world, an understanding of the fetishism strategy can help to preserve the human dialogue that is the basis of all human relationships. Kaplan writes from the heart as well as from the intellect.

"A weird, wonderful, scholarly book packed with heady ideas about robots, biography, tattoos, psychoanalytic training, footbinding, filmmaking, sex, death, and the different ways people kill the emotional confusion of being alive. Louise Kaplan brings together a rich and dizzying set of subjects, and nobody who reads her will be able to use the word 'fetish' or its variants quite so casually again." - Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters

"Louise Kaplan, one of our most persuasive psychoanalytic writers, is a thought-provoking companion as she uncovers fetishism in a startlingly wide range of behavior and imagery. I found myself agreeing here, dissenting there, but always absorbed and stimulated by the intellectual journey. One of her main themes, the threatening vitality of female sexuality, is as vexing and important today as when she first started writing about it, and her chapter on archive fever is a revelation." - Molly Haskell

"Louise Kaplan writes about our psychological complexities with exceptional insight, clarity, and verve." - Hilma Wolitzer, author of The Doctor's Daughter

"Kaplan situates herself at the cutting edge of contemporary psychoanalytic thought, but as always in her engaging, accessible way. Cultures of Fetishism is sure to appeal to academics, psychoanalysts, and general readers interested in cultural criticism. I know of no other book quite like it, even though fetishism itself has attracted a great deal of attention in the past ten years or so." - Alan Bass, author of Difference and Disavowal; Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research; Training Analyst and Faculty, IPTAR, NY Freudian Society, and NPAP

LOUISE J. KAPLAN is a psychoanalyst, author, and feminist scholar. She has published six critically acclaimed books: Oneness and Separateness, Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood, The Family Romance of the Impostor Poet, Thomas Chatterton, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary, and No Voice is Ever Wholly Lost. She is the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award for distinguished literary achievement.