Liberal Dictionary English Dictionary
noun
- belief in or use of fetishes.
- Psychiatry. the compulsive use of some object, or part of the body, as a stimulus in the course of attaining sexual gratification, as a shoe, a lock of hair, or underclothes.
- blind devotion: a fetishism of sacrifice to one’s children.
noun
- a condition in which the handling of an inanimate object or a specific part of the body other than the sexual organs is a source of sexual satisfaction
- belief in or recourse to a fetish for magical purposes
- excessive attention or attachment to something
1801, “worship of fetishes;” in the purely psycho-sexual sense first recorded 1897 in writings of Henry Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), from fetish + -ism.
In certain perversions of the sexual instinct, the person, part of the body, or particular object belonging to the person by whom the impulse is excited, is called the fetish of the patient. [E. Morselli in “Baldwin Dictionary of Philosophy,” 1901]
Related: Fetishist (1845; psycho-sexual sense from 1897).
n.
- The act of using a fetish for sexual arousal and gratification.