Mistress Dakota captures the nature of fetish neatly and cleanly:
People refer to us as therapists but, in a way, we’re more like entertainers, doing an ad-lib, self-indulgent performance. We’re reacting to an audience of one. Psychotherapy is intended to cure a neurosis. We intend to make the neurosis functional and fun. Which isn’t to say that all our clients are neurotic, because they’re not. But everybody has neurosis. And I think that it can be therapeutic to learn to enjoy things that most people fear. And to have someone there encouraging you and participating with you. Every time I talk to psychologists about their theories on S&M, they either base everything on their own fetishes or they try to generalize. But the whole point of a fetish is that other people don’t get it. That’s practically the definition of a fetish. That one person responds to something that most people don’t.
The whole interview: Some People Call Us Goddesses : Interview with Mistress Dakota