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Ednei Soares | An Acceptable Abnormality?
22nd July, 2026 in Author’s corner
Ednei Soares is a psychoanalyst and holds a PhD from Radboud University.
The history of fetishism reminds us that human sexuality persistently exceeds the categories through which we try to understand it.
In An Acceptable Abnormality?, Ednei Soares explores how Freud’s lifelong engagement with fetishism reshaped some of the central concepts of psychoanalysis. In this Q&A, Soares discusses the book’s origins, the influence of Alfred Binet on Freud’s thinking, and why the history of fetishism continues to matter for contemporary debates about sexuality and gender.
Briefly and concisely explain in plain language what the book is about.
At first glance, fetishism may seem like a marginal or unusual aspect of sexuality. My book argues the opposite. It shows that fetishism became one of the greatest theoretical challenges Freud ever faced. Throughout his career, Freud repeatedly returned to this phenomenon because it resisted all of his attempts to explain it within a coherent theory of sexuality.
By tracing Freud’s engagement with fetishism from his earliest writings to his final works, the book reveals how this seemingly “exceptional” phenomenon gradually transformed his thinking about desire, object choice, repression, psychic conflict, and even the structure of the ego itself. It also uncovers the overlooked influence of Alfred Binet on Freud’s ideas and shows how this forgotten dialogue continues to resonate in Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as in contemporary feminist, queer, and trans theory.
Ultimately, this is not only a book about fetishism. It is a book about how scientific ideas evolve when confronted with questions they cannot easily answer.
What or who inspired you to choose this topic?
I have always been fascinated by Freud’s extraordinary persistence. Few concepts accompanied him for so many decades as fetishism did. He repeatedly revised his explanations, abandoned earlier assumptions, and returned to the problem from entirely new perspectives.
What intrigued me most was discovering that many of these developments cannot be understood without Alfred Binet, whose work Freud quietly carried with him throughout much of his career. Following this intellectual dialogue opened an entirely new way of understanding Freud’s theory of sexuality and revealed how historical conversations continue to shape contemporary psychoanalysis.
Did the book turn out the way you imagined it? In what way(s) did it or did it not?
In many ways, yes—but the research also led me in directions I had never anticipated.
What began as a study of Freud’s theory of fetishism gradually became an intellectual history of how psychoanalysis developed through dialogue with psychiatry, neuropathology, psychology, and later structuralism. The deeper I explored the sources, the clearer it became that fetishism was never simply another “perversion.” It functioned as a persistent riddle that repeatedly forced Freud to rethink some of the foundations of psychoanalysis.
Rather than solving that riddle, the book demonstrates why it remained productive precisely because it resisted definitive solutions.
What social impact do you think the book can have, or would you like it to have?
I hope the book encourages readers to think more critically about the relationship between sexuality and pathology.
Historically, many forms of sexual diversity have been understood primarily through medical or psychiatric classifications. Revisiting Freud’s long struggle with fetishism reminds us that human sexuality often exceeds the categories designed to contain it. The book invites readers to approach sexual diversity with greater historical sensitivity and theoretical nuance, recognising that what once appeared as pathology often reveals something fundamental about human subjectivity itself.
More fundamentally, I hope the book encourages readers to reflect on the history of the concept of fetishism itself. Within nineteenth-century European scientific thought, “fetishism” became a way of classifying the religious and cultural practices of non-European societies as irrational, primitive, or pathological. One of the book’s broader arguments is that this classificatory project never fully succeeded. As the concept travelled into psychiatry, sexology, and eventually psychoanalysis, it repeatedly escaped the very frameworks that sought to contain it. Rather than reinforcing fixed distinctions between normality and pathology, fetishism continually destabilised them.
In what way do you think your book can shape future research in your research field?
I hope it encourages scholars to revisit Freud historically rather than retrospectively.
Instead of reading Freud through concepts that only emerged later, the book reconstructs the intellectual problems he was actually trying to solve and the authors with whom he was in conversation. This perspective opens new possibilities for research on psychoanalysis, the history of sexuality, the history of psychiatry, and the development of concepts such as repression, splitting, disavowal, and psychic defence.
I also hope it stimulates new dialogue between psychoanalysis and contemporary gender and queer studies, where many of these questions continue to be debated. More broadly, I hope it encourages scholars to examine how psychological and psychiatric concepts are historically produced. The history of fetishism demonstrates that scientific categories are never entirely neutral; they often emerge within broader cultural, political, and colonial contexts. Understanding this history allows us to rethink how psychoanalysis inherited, transformed, and sometimes challenged earlier systems of classification.
What is your favourite part of the book and why?
It is difficult to choose a single chapter because the book was written as one continuous argument.
If I had to choose, however, I would point to the chapters that reconstruct Freud’s dialogue with Alfred Binet. Discovering how many of Freud’s later ideas echo Binet’s earlier work was one of the most rewarding parts of the entire research process and, I believe, one of the book’s most original contributions.
How did the writing process for this book go? Did you experience anything surprising, amusing or striking?
The writing itself was less difficult than deciding what to leave out.
The historical literature surrounding Freud, fetishism, nineteenth-century psychiatry, French psychology, Lacanian theory, feminist theory, and contemporary gender studies is enormous. One of the greatest challenges was selecting only those materials that genuinely advanced the central argument.
Perhaps the most surprising discovery was the remarkable persistence of Alfred Binet throughout Freud’s work. Time and again, ideas concerning doubling, psychic splitting, memory, and fetishism reappeared in new forms across decades of Freud’s writings. Equally striking was discovering how a concept that originated within European colonial encounters gradually migrated into psychiatry, sexology, psychoanalysis, economics, and contemporary critical theory, while never becoming fully stable in any of these fields.
What was the most challenging step in the entire creation process of your book?
Knowing when to stop revising.
Historical research constantly reveals new sources, new interpretations, and new connections. Every revision suggested another possible improvement. Learning that a book is never completely finished—but eventually has to be completed—was perhaps the most difficult lesson of the entire project.
What would have been good advice before you started this book project?
Take your time.
Some research questions deserve years rather than months. Allow yourself to read widely, question your own assumptions, and change your mind whenever the evidence requires it. Good scholarship is rarely about confirming what we already believe; it is about allowing the sources to surprise us.
What would you like readers to remember about your book?
I hope readers remember that Freud never fully solved the riddle of fetishism—and that this was precisely what made it so important.
Some questions remain productive precisely because they resist every attempt to domesticate them. Freud’s lifelong engagement with fetishism transformed psychoanalysis not because it produced certainty, but because the phenomenon continually escaped the diagnostic and conceptual frameworks designed to explain it. In many ways, the history of fetishism reminds us that human sexuality persistently exceeds the categories through which we try to understand it.
Beyond Freud himself, I hope readers come away with the sense that the history of fetishism is also the history of the limits of classification itself. From its origins in European encounters with non-European societies to its later appropriation by psychiatry, sexology, and psychoanalysis, fetishism repeatedly escaped the conceptual frameworks designed to contain it. Rather than confirming rigid distinctions between normality and pathology, it continually exposed their instability. In that sense, the history of fetishism reminds us that human sexuality persistently exceeds the categories through which we try to understand it.
If you could travel through time, where would you want to go to talk about your research/book?
I would love to attend one of the early meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
It would be fascinating to present the book to Freud and his closest collaborators and ask how they would respond to the argument that fetishism occupied a far more central place in the development of psychoanalysis than has usually been recognised. I would also be curious to hear Alfred Binet’s reaction, given how deeply his ideas seem to echo throughout Freud’s work.
Your book will be published open access. What makes open access so attractive for you/your book?
I am delighted that the book will become openly accessible in 2029 through the Path to Open initiative. Open access allows specialised research to reach readers who might otherwise never have access to it—students, independent scholars, researchers in countries with limited library resources, and readers working across disciplines. For a book that seeks to stimulate dialogue between psychoanalysis, history, philosophy, gender studies, and the humanities more broadly, that wider accessibility is especially valuable.
Do you have any plans yet for another publication? What will it be about?
Yes. My next major project will focus on the history and development of defence mechanisms in psychoanalysis.
While defence mechanisms are among the most influential concepts in psychoanalytic theory, their historical evolution remains surprisingly underexplored. I hope to reconstruct how these ideas developed from Freud’s earliest writings to later psychoanalytic traditions, examining how they shaped our understanding of conflict, adaptation, and mental life.
