Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood (SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture) [Hardcover]

The heart of Eby's project resides in his effort to give a synthetic account of Hemingway's fascination with hair. Eby is not, of course, the first to notice this preoccupation. But he is the first to try to understand its full psychological complexity, as well as to trace the substitutive logic by which Hemingway moves from meditations on hair to, say, fantasies about cats, the actual slaughter of rabbits, dreams about lions, a desire for pierced ears, and a wish for the dark pigmentation of racially marked skin. For Eby, each of these represents a displaced version of the primal fetish, hair. His book sets out to explore this proposition by showing, first, _that_ Hemingway was a fetishist and _how_ he came to be one; and second, why it was that hair in particular became his fetish of choice....

Eby makes [his] theoretical argument cumulatively over several chapters. He draws not only on Freud's classic work, but on more recent theories by Joyce McDougall, Phyllis Greenacre, George Zavitzianos, D. W. Winnicott, and especially, Robert Stoller. In doing so, he makes provocative claims about the relations between fetishism, melancholia, and transvestism; about the tendency of male perversions to bolster conventional masculinity, despite appearing to undermine it; about the inverse relation between artistic creativity and fetishistic fixation; and about the fetish object's link to what Winnicott calls the 'transitional object.'

But more impressive than this theoretical sophistication is Eby's firm commitment to the expressive character of literature--to the proposition that literature offers psychological insights that are multifaceted and theoretically irreducible. His readings seek to grant Hemingway's works their idiosyncratic forms of knowledge. He does not, accordingly, merely use fetishism as a lens through which to read Hemingway's texts, but interprets Hemingway's fiction in a way that illuminates and renders more complex our understanding of the psychology of fetishism."

--Greg Forter, _The Hemingway Review_

The book offers for the first time a theoretically sophisticated and comprehensive study of Hemingway's gender instability, erotic attachment to hair, narcissism, latent homosexuality, castration anxiety, and split toward women.... Hemingway's Fetishism is an extraordinary book ... written with verve, wit, and good humor. [Eby] is always self-critical of his methodology and suggests other explanations for the ones he provides, thus convincing us that he can see a variety of critical perspectives. Eby demythologizes Hemingway without dehumanizing him or dismissing him, and despite his heavy reliance upon psychoanalytic theory, he avoids the language of psychobabble. He also avoids pathography, arguing instead that the childhood events that damaged Hemingway's psyche may have contributed to his ability to identify with others. It is doubtful that any study published in the next few years on Hemingway will be as insightful and controversial as this one.

--Jeffrey Berman, Psychoanalytic Books