Fetishism And Paraphilia

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Fetishism and paraphilia can be defined as a longstanding and persistent sexual interest that describes a powerful eroticization of a part of another person’s body (feet, hair, breasts), non-living objects (shoes, clothing, objects), (Kafka, 2010) or activities and experiences (sadism, masochism, voyeurism, and pedophilia) (Friedman & Downey, 2000). Many individuals view their fetishes to be a healthy expression of sexuality; however, it is considered a paraphilia disorder if it produces significant psychological distress or impairment of functioning (Dawson, Bannerman, & Lalumière, 2016). For the purpose of this paper, fetishism and paraphilia are defined as one in the same. Many fetishes are accepted by society such as seductive clothes, …show more content…

He viewed the development of fetishes as a result of early childhood experiences (Freund, Seto, & Kuban, 1996). He stated, “sexual deviations were often the result of accidental experiences with a deviant act that was presumably rewarding.” (Binet as cited in Atkins, 2004). Atkins goes on to explain that it is the pairing of two separate stimuli under specific conditions that lead to its fruition. Some of the earliest research on conditioning was done by Rachman and Hodgson in 1968 (as cited in Lowenstein, 2002). This study revealed successful conditioning of an individual by repeatedly pairing a women’s boot and an attractive nude female, thus resulting in sexual …show more content…

Higher order conditioning is defined as a previously neutral stimulus that has been paired with a conditioned stimulus, which therefore attempts to create an identically conditioned response as the stimulus that has been conditioned (Murdock, 2013, p. 247). With this in mind, once that stimulus has been conditioned, it serves the same role as the unconditioned stimulus, which in the case of Laws and Marshell’s model, was sexual arousal. From there, it was paired with another stimulus that subsequently acquired properties that were sexual as well. Atkins (2004) explains that this model also highlighted the significance of operant conditioning in the role of the development of paraphilia and