ABSTRACT
When early sexologists were searching for a term to describe this paraphilia, they borrowed from the Portuguese term, because in their opinion, like a religious fetish, an erotic fetish, too, possessed magical powers. It had the power to arouse emotions and to inspire sexual ecstasy in a person who was otherwise non-arousable. If a person who could not be aroused by normal erotic stimuli (say, a nude woman) could be aroused by an inanimate object, say, a sandal or a shoe, the object did have a kind of magical power on that person, and was thus a fetish. The initial word for this paraphilia, reecting its true etymology, was fetichism (with a “c” in place of “s”), which ultimately was changed to fetishism. The obsolete spelling fetichism can be seen in many earlier works discussing this phenomenon. Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), for instance, used the earlier word fetichism in his book Psychopathia Sexualis. Today religious fetishism and erotic or sexual fetishism are two separate terms having distinct meanings.
