Great questions, Mistress Fei! Sorry for the super long reply, I can't help myself
I would guess that for Freud the fetish is already (and only?) an expression of unconscious motivations (mother-love and -fear, etc), and, if so, I'm not sure I buy that story. I suspect I may take some issue with his conception of neurosis, too. That said, I can't argue that repressing desire is often harmful, especially if one is repressing it out of a sense of shame or the like.
I watched online bdsm videos (especially POV videos) for years before coming to the Fortress a few weeks ago, but I can't quite say when I first noticed my urges. (Actually, I wasn't totally sure that, as Mistress Koi put it, I "have a sub side" or am "what we call masochistic" until feeling the way I did, bound, looking up into her beautiful eyes as she wrapped her hands around my throat!) I was basically taught about sex by pop culture, porn, and my confused adolescent body. These were not great teachers, and I did not develop a very clear language for my sexuality.
For a long time I felt broken. I attached a psychoanalytic (though probably not entirely Freudian) meaning to my sexuality. In short, I thought the desire (say, to be slapped by a beautiful dominant woman) MEANT something, and that some unconscious motivation lurked underneath it and needed to be resolved. It felt like a secret that had to be divulged. (To a certain extent, I assumed the more mainstream of my desires were hints of health and integration and the fears or less mainstream desires were evidence of dissociation or shame, etc.)
I considered going to a dungeon every so often, but usually, after clicking around, everything I found online felt unsafe, plus I felt conflicted and confused, anyway. I wasn't trying to find a dungeon when I found the FF website (the look on Mistress Koi's face when I told her that I "stumbled upon it" was amazing, but it's true!). Being confronted with the possibility of living my fantasies has always been thrilling and scary. I kept clicking around the site and reading, expecting to feel that icky, unsafe feeling, but it never came. (It's a great site, and a super well-run business, I'm really impressed and grateful!) I was in Japan at the time, and I wasn't sure when I'd next be in NYC, but over the next few days I kept coming back to the site and imagining.
I'd started cultivating a sense of privacy. This is part of a big effortful shift in my thinking over the last few years, but long story short, most relevant for this post: rather than treat my desire as a secret pointing to some dark, hidden undercurrent of brokenness, I started teaching myself to just take it for what it is. (And, thus, to experience it as MINE. Sharing it - with Mistress Koi, with my girlfriend, with a friend, whomever - is a choice, not a requirement.) Sometimes that psychoanalytic impulse is correct, and/or at the very least useful. But sometimes the need to look under the surface just creates the fear that there is something lurking under the surface. I was more afraid of what my desires MEANT than I was of the desires themselves. So all that (plus the tingly feeling I got when looking at Mistress Koi's page over and over!) meant that when I got back to the States, I booked a trip to New York and to the Fortress.
My open exploration - or, at least, my session with Mistress Koi and my plan to return to the Fortress ASAP - has been really helpful for me. There's lots to share, but I've gone on long enough, so I'll keep it as short as I can. As far as I'm concerned I took the step to "open exploration" at the perfect time. Any earlier, and I would have interpreted my experience - positive, negative, mixed, whatever - in terms of the same suspicious structure (what secret hidden in my psyche does this point to??). Instead, it bolstered my growing capacity for just having things as they are. I enjoyed almost every second of my session with Mistress Koi, from the second she walked in to the moment we hugged, and over the next several days I watched with a mix of joy and sadness as the bite marks and scratch marks and whiplashes faded. It's not an exaggeration to say that, even after just the one session, I trust myself more, and suspect myself less.
Lots of other unexpected minor benefits, too, but that's enough! I really hope you found all that interesting and helpful!
Thanks for the great questions, Mistress Fei. I'm really looking forward to meeting you some time, and to you playing with me