From a psychological perspective, conjecture can lead to classical conditioning that will influence the formation of fixed mental patterns, including sexual desire and fetishes.Fetishes are mainly habitual behaviours, similar to the way men like to visit electronics shops and women like to visit clothing shops. Some fetishes are the result of a conditioned response towards an object in the same way a lustful man experiences pleasurable feelings (the conditioned response) in his emotional thinking as soon as he sees high heels. These objects lead to a conditioned response in his sexual behaviour. He may be experiencing a certain kind of emotion in his inner world leading him to express his psychological response as a sexual or habitual fetish.

The treatment of fetishists is the same as the treatment of paedophiles and rapists, where the treatment method lies in controlling habitual responses. The first step is to control their fantasies and guide their thoughts so that they will leave behind the object or person of their (possibly violent) fantasies while reducing the fantasies they have about the object. For example, having a paedophile see other children as their own child and to view a rape mentality as a mentality that belongs to low level animals so that they will develop a sense of disgust at their own thinking and develop what they believe to be a normal human being's conditioned response. This will help them shape wishes and desires like those of a normal person.

In psychology, affection is a kind of expression and is divided into two types: secret affection not made known to the beloved and love openly expressed to the beloved. The positive and negative thinking that accompanies love openly expressed to the person of affection is a normal expression of human nature, while secret affection is a kind of abnormal state with distorted cognition. Fetishism occurs when a characteristic of the object triggers the person's corresponding thoughts and responses. The psychotherapist needs to take into account the person's unique characteristics to help the person express their secret affection. Psychotherapy can then help the person understand what normal psychological behaviour is, remove the mental darkness from the person, and help the person gain positive interests and habits. Only by doing so can the patient change their cognition from a fantasy-based model to one that is based upon reality and conditioned response.