Sigmund Freud’s appropriation of fetishism was rooted in animism, but also an expression of the fetish’s conceptualization at the crossroads of modernity and colonialism. For Freud, it was the apparently worthless thing valued by the individual, sexualizing the fetish, that was also bound up with the sacred. Freud’s conceptualization of fetishism is the question of modernity put to religion. Following commentary on the Freudian corpus through Jacques Lacan, Jean-Joseph Goux, Slavoj Žižek, Mari Ruti, Paul Ricoeur, Michel de Certeau, and Edward Said, we explore his conceptualization of the “Thing” (das Ding), which promised to restore a seemingly primordial lack within the subject. In the end, the de-stabilization of identity itself is at stake through the de-constructive force of the fetishistic which perpetually unsettles any attempt to totalize the self.