ABSTRACT
In a recent issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Lawrence Josephs addressed the subject of sexual disgust in a paper titled “The Treatment of Oedipal Disgust: When One Person’s Sexual Delight is Another’s Disgust.” However, Josephs's effort to materially establish moral cognition, deny variance and variability among the !Kung San hunting-gathering people in favor of a single ideal type, and postulate a single face for a universal human expression of disgust are not merely forms of madness, they are all hallmarks of reification. Partridge traces the etymology of the verb “to reify” as derivative from “real,” thus at root, meaning “to invest with reality, whence reification, is literally ‘to make property of’’”. The process of reification is made manifest for anthropologists and psychoanalysts alike in the form of the fetish. A relational perspective includes but is not limited to fetishized objects, nor constrained by reified internal or external human qualities in order to comprehend its subject.
