Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume V Part 7

(J. A. Rimbaud, uvres, p. 68.) In women, also, there would appear to be traceable a somewhat similar ostentation, though in them it is complicated and largely inhibited by modesty, and at the same time diffused over the body owing to the absence of external s.e.xual organs. "Primitive woman," remarks Madame Renooz, "proud of her womanhood, for a long time defended her nakedness which ancient art has always represented. And in the actual life of the young girl to-day there is a moment when by a secret atavism she feels the pride of her s.e.x, the intuition of her moral superiority, and cannot understand why she must hide its cause. At this moment, wavering between the laws of Nature and social conventions, she scarcely knows if nakedness should or should not affright her. A sort of confused atavistic memory recalls to her a period before clothing was known, and reveals to her as a paradisaical ideal the customs of that human epoch." (Celine Renooz, Psychologie Comparee de l'Homme et de la Femme, p. 85.) It may be added that among primitive peoples, and even among some remote European populations to-day, the exhibition of feminine nudity has sometimes been regarded as a spectacle with religious or magic operation. (Ploss, Das Weib, seventh edition, vol. ii, pp. 663-680; Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, fourth edition, p. 304.) It is stated by Gopcevic that in the long struggle between the Albanians and the Montenegrians the women of the former people would stand in the front rank and expose themselves by raising their skirts, believing that they would thus insure victory. As, however, they were shot down, and as, moreover, victory usually fell to the Montenegrians, this custom became discredited. (Quoted by Bloch, Op. cit., Teil II, p. 307.)

With regard to the a.s.sociation, suggested by Stanley Hall, between exhibitionism and an unusual degree of development of the s.e.xual organs, it must be remarked that both extremes-a very large and a very small p.e.n.i.s-are specially common in exhibitionists. The prevalence of the small organ is due to an a.s.sociation of exhibitionism with s.e.xual feebleness. The prevalence of the large organ may be due to the cause suggested by Hall. Among Mahommedans the s.e.xual organs are sometimes habitually exposed by religious penitents, and I note that Bernhard Stern, in his book on the medical and s.e.xual aspects of life in Turkey, referring to a penitent of this sort whom he saw on the Stamboul bridge at Constantinople, remarks that the organ was very largely developed. It may well be in such a case that the penitent's religious att.i.tude is reinforced by some lingering relic of a more fleshly ostentation.

It is by a pseudo-atavism that this phallicism is evoked in the exhibitionist. There is no true emergence of an ancestrally inherited instinct, but by the paralysis or inhibition of the finer and higher feelings current in civilization, the exhibitionist is placed on the same mental level as the man of a more primitive age, and he thus presents the basis on which the impulses belonging to a higher culture may naturally take root and develop.

Reference may here be made to a form of primitive exhibitionism, almost confined to women, which, although certainly symbolic, is absolutely non-s.e.xual, and must not, therefore, be confused with the phenomena we are here occupied with. I refer to the exhibition of the b.u.t.tocks as a mark of contempt. In its most primitive form, no doubt, this exhibitionism is a kind of exorcism, a method of putting evil spirits, primarily, and secondarily evil-disposed persons, to flight. It is the most effective way for a woman to display s.e.xual centers, and it shares in the magical virtues which all unveiling of the s.e.xual centers is believed by primitive peoples to possess. It is recorded that the women of some peoples in the Balkan peninsula formerly used this gesture against enemies in battle. In the sixteenth century so distinguished a theologian as Luther when a.s.sailed by the Evil One at night was able to put the adversary to flight by protruding his uncovered b.u.t.tocks from the bed. But the spiritual significance of this att.i.tude is lost with the decay of primitive beliefs. It survives, but merely as a gesture of insult. The symbolism comes to have reference to the nates as the excretory focus, the seat of the a.n.u.s. In any case it ignores any s.e.xual attractiveness in this part of the body. Exhibitionism of this kind, therefore, can scarcely arise in persons of any sensitiveness or aesthetic perception, even putting aside the question of modesty, and there seems to be little trace of it in cla.s.sic antiquity when the nates were regarded as objects of beauty. Among the Egyptians, however, we gather from Herodotus (Bk. II, Chapter LX) that at a certain popular religious festival men and women would go in boats on the Nile, singing and playing, and when they approached a town the women on the boats would insult the women of the town by injurious language and by exposing themselves. Among the Arabs, however, the specific gesture we are concerned with is noted, and a man to whom vengeance is forbidden would express his feelings by exposing his posterior and strewing earth on his head (Wellhausen, Rests Arabischen Heidentums, 1897, p. 195). It is in Europe and in mediaeval and later times that this emphatic gesture seems to have flourished as a violent method of expressing contempt. It was by no means confined to the lower cla.s.ses, and Kleinpaul, in discussing this form of "speech without words," quotes examples of various n.o.ble persons, even princesses, who are recorded thus to have expressed their feelings. (Kleinpaul, Sprache ohne Worte, pp. 271-273.) In more recent times the gesture has become merely a rare and extreme expression of unrestrained feeling in coa.r.s.e-grained peasants. Zola, in the figure of Mouquette in Germinal, may be said to have given a kind of cla.s.sic expression to the gesture. In the more remote parts of Europe it appears to be still not altogether uncommon. This seems to be notably the case among the South Slavs, and Krauss states that "when a South Slav woman wishes to express her deepest contempt for anyone she bends forward, with left hand raising her skirts, and with the right slapping her posterior, at the same time exclaiming: 'This for you!'" (???pt?d?a, vol. vi, p. 200.)

A verbal survival of this gesture, consisting in the contemptuous invitation to kiss this region, still exists among us in remote parts of the country, especially as an insult offered by an angry woman who forgets herself. It is said to be commonly used in Wales. ("Welsh aedlogy," ???pt?d?a, vol. ii, pp. 358, et seq.) In Cornwall, when addressed by a woman to a man it is sometimes regarded as a deadly insult, even if the woman is young and attractive, and may cause a life-long enmity between related families. From this point of view the nates are a symbol of contempt, and any s.e.xual significance is excluded. (The distinction is brought out by Diderot in Le Neveu de Rameau: "Lui:-Il y a d'autres jours ou il ne m'en coterait rien pour etre vil tant qu'on voudrait; ces jours-la, pour un liard, je baiserais le cul a la pet.i.te Hus. Moi:-Eh! mais, l'ami, elle est blanche, jolie, douce, potelee, et c'est un acte d'humilite auquel un plus delicat que vous pourrait quelquefois s'abaisser. Lui:-Entendons-nous; c'est qu'il y a baiser le cul au simple, et baiser le cul au figure.")

It must be added that a s.e.xual form of exhibitionism of the nates must still be recognized. It occurs in masochism and expresses the desire for pa.s.sive flagellation. Rousseau, whose emotional life was profoundly affected by the castigations which as a child he received from Mlle Lambercier, has in his Confessions told us how, when a youth, he would sometimes expose himself in this way in the presence of young women. Such m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic exhibitionism seems, however, to be rare.

While the manifestations of exhibitionism are substantially the same in all cases, there are many degrees and varieties of the condition. We may find among exhibitionists, as Garnier remarks, dementia, states of unconsciousness, epilepsy, general paralysis, alcoholism, but the most typical cases, he adds, if not indeed the cases to which the term properly belongs, are those in which it is an impulsive obsession. Krafft-Ebing[60] divides exhibitionists into four clinical groups: (1) acquired states of mental weakness, with cerebral or spinal disease clouding consciousness and at the same time causing impotence; (2) epileptics, in whom the act is an abnormal organic impulse performed in a state of imperfect consciousness; (3) a somewhat allied group of neurasthenic cases; (4) periodical impulsive cases with deep hereditary taint. This cla.s.sification is not altogether satisfactory. Garnier's cla.s.sification, placing the group of obsessional cases in the foreground and leaving the other more vaguely defined groups in the background, is probably better. I am inclined to consider that most of the cases fall into one or other of two mixed groups. The first cla.s.s includes cases in which there is more or less congenital abnormality, but otherwise a fair or even complete degree of mental integrity; they are usually young adults, they are more or less precisely conscious of the end they wish to attain, and it is often only with a severe struggle that they yield to their impulses. In the second cla.s.s the beginnings of mental or nervous disease have diminished the sensibility of the higher centers; the subjects are usually old men whose lives have been absolutely correct; they are often only vaguely aware of the nature of the satisfaction they are seeking, and frequently no struggle precedes the manifestation; such was the case of the overworked clergyman described by Hughes,[61] who, after much study, became morose and absent-minded, and committed acts of exhibitionism which he could not explain but made no attempt to deny; with rest and restorative treatment his health improved and the acts ceased. It is in the first cla.s.s of cases alone that there is a developed s.e.xual perversion. In the cases of the second cla.s.s there is a more or less definite s.e.xual intention, but it is only just conscious, and the emergence of the impulse is due not to its strength but to the weakness, temporary or permanent, of the higher inhibiting centers.

Epileptic cases, with loss of consciousness during the act, can only be regarded as presenting a pseudo-exhibitionism. They should be excluded altogether. It is undoubtedly true that many cases of real or apparent exhibitionism occur in epileptics.[62] We must not, however, too hastily conclude that because these acts occur in epileptics they are necessarily unconscious acts. Epilepsy frequently occurs on a basis of hereditary degeneration, and the exhibitionism may be, and not infrequently is, a stigma of the degeneracy and not an indication of the occurrence of a minor epileptic fit. When the act of pseudo-exhibitionism is truly epileptic, it will usually have no psychic s.e.xual content, and it will certainly be liable to occur under all sorts of circ.u.mstances, when the patient is alone or in a miscellaneous concourse of people. It will be on a level with the acts of the highly respectable young woman who, at the conclusion of an attack of pet.i.t mal, consisting chiefly of a sudden desire to pa.s.s urine, on one occasion lifted up her clothes and urinated at a public entertainment, so that it was with difficulty her friends prevented her from being handed over to the police.[63] Such an act is automatic, unconscious, and involuntary; the spectators are not even perceived; it cannot be an act of exhibitionism. Whenever, on the other hand, the place and the time are evidently chosen deliberately,-a quiet spot, the presence of only one or two young women or children,-it is difficult to admit that we are in the presence of a fit of epileptic unconsciousness, even when the subject is known to be epileptic.

Even, however, when we exclude those epileptic pseudo-exhibitionists who, from the legal point of view, are clearly irresponsible, it must still be remembered that in every case of exhibitionism there is a high degree of either mental abnormality on a neuropathic basis, or else of actual disease. This is true to a greater extent in exhibitionism than in almost any other form of s.e.xual perversion. No subject of exhibitionism should be sent to prison without expert medical examination.

[54]

Lasege first drew attention to this s.e.xual perversion and gave it its generally accepted name, "Les Exhibitionistes," L'Union Medicale, May, 1877. Magnan, on various occasions (for example, "Les Exhibitionistes," Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle, vol. v, 1890, p. 456), has given further development and precision to the clinical picture of the exhibitionist.

[55]

B. Ball. La Folie Erotique, p. 86.

[56]

Moll, Untersuchungen uber die Libido s.e.xualis, bd. i, p. 661.

[57]

"Exhibitionism in its most typical form is," Garnier truly says, "a systematic act, manifesting itself as the strange equivalent of a s.e.xual connection, or its subst.i.tution." The brief account of exhibitionism (pp. 433-437) in Garnier's discussion of "Perversions s.e.xuelles" at the International Medical Congress at Paris in 1900 (Section de Psychiatrie: Comptes-Rendus) is the most satisfactory statement of the psychological aspects of this perversion with which I am acquainted. Garnier's unrivalled clinical knowledge of these manifestations, due to his position during many years as physician at the Depot of the Prefecture of Police in Paris, adds great weight to his conclusions.

[58]

The symbolism of coitus involved in flagellation has been touched on by Eulenburg (s.e.xuale Neuropathie, p. 121), and is more fully developed by Duhren (Geschlechtsleben in England, bd. ii, pp. 366, et seq.).

[59]

A. Hoche, Neurologische Centralblatt, 1896, No. 2.

[60]

Op. cit., pp. 478, et seq.

[61]

C. H. Hughes, "Morbid Exhibitionism," Alienist and Neurologist, August, 1904. Another somewhat similar American case, also preceded by overwork, and eventually adjudged insane by the courts, is recorded by D. S. Booth, Alienist and Neurologist, February, 1905.

[62]

Exhibitionism in epilepsy is briefly discussed by Fere, L'Instinct s.e.xuel, second edition, pp. 194-195.

[63]

W. S. Colman, "Post-Epileptic Unconscious Automatic Actions," Lancet, July 5, 1890.

VI.

The Forms of Erotic Symbolism are Simulacra of Coitus-Wide Extension of Erotic Symbolism-Fetichism Not Covering the Whole Ground of s.e.xual Selection-It is Based on the Individual Factor in Selection-Crystallization-The Lover and the Artist-The Key to Erotic Symbolism to be Found in the Emotional Sphere-The Pa.s.sage to Pathological Extremes.

We have now examined several very various and yet very typical manifestations in all of which it is not difficult to see how, in some strange and eccentric form-on a basis of a.s.sociation through resemblance or contiguity or both combined-there arises a definite mimicry of the normal s.e.xual act together with the normal emotions which accompany that act. It has become clear in what sense we are justified in recognizing erotic symbolism.

The symbolic and, as it were, abstracted nature of these manifestations is shown by the remarkable way in which they are sometimes capable of transference from the object to the subject. That is to say that the fetichist may show a tendency to cultivate his fetich in his own person. A foot-fetichist may like to go barefoot himself; a man who admired lame women liked to halt himself; a man who was attracted by small waists in women found s.e.xual gratification in tight-lacing himself; a man who was fascinated by fine white skin and wished to cut it found satisfaction in cutting his own skin; Moll's coprolagnic fetichist found a voluptuous pleasure in his own acts of defecation. (See, e.g., Krafft-Ebing, Op. cit., p. 221, 224, 226; Hammond, s.e.xual Impotence, p. 74; cf. ante, p. 68.) Such symbolic transference seems to have a profoundly natural basis, for we may see a somewhat similar phenomenon in the well-known tendency of cows to mount a cow in heat. This would appear to be, not so much a h.o.m.os.e.xual impulse, as the dynamic psychic action of an olfactory s.e.xual symbol in a transformed form.

We seem to have here a psychic process which is a curious reversal of that process of Einfuhlung-the projection of one's own activities into the object contemplated-which Lipps has so fruitfully developed as the essence of every aesthetic condition. (T. Lipps, aesthetik, Teil I, 1903.) By Einfuhlung our own interior activity becomes the activity of the object perceived, a thing being beautiful in proportion as it lends itself to our Einfuhlung. But by this action of erotic symbolism, on the other hand, we transfer the activity of the object into ourselves.

When the idea of erotic symbolism as manifested in such definite and typical forms becomes realized, it further becomes clear that the vaguer manifestations of such symbolism are exceedingly widespread. When in a previous volume we were discussing and drawing together the various threads which unite "Love and Pain," it will now be understood that we were standing throughout on the threshold of erotic symbolism. Pain itself, in the sense in which we slowly learned to define it in this relations.h.i.+p-as a state of intense emotional excitement-may, under a great variety of special circ.u.mstances, become an erotic symbol and afford the same relief as the emotions normally accompanying the s.e.xual act. Active algolagnia or sadism is thus a form of erotic symbolism; pa.s.sive algolagnia or masochism is (in a man) an inverted form of erotic symbolism. Active flagellation or pa.s.sive flagellation are, in exactly the same way, manifestations of erotic symbolism, the imaginative mimicry of coitus.

Binet and also Krafft-Ebing[64] have argued in effect that the whole of s.e.xual selection is a matter of fetichism, that is to say, of erotic symbolism of object. "Normal love," Binet states, "appears as the result of a complicated fetichism." Tarde also seems to have regarded love as normally a kind of fetichism. "We are a long time before we fall in love with a woman," he remarks; "we must wait to see the detail which strikes and delights us, and causes us to overlook what displeases us. Only in normal love the details are many and always changing. Constancy in love is rarely anything else but a voyage around the beloved person, a voyage of exploration and ever new discoveries. The most faithful lover does not love the same woman in the same way for two days in succession."[65]

From that point of view normal s.e.xual love is the sway of a fetich-more or less arbitrary, more or less (as Binet terms it) polytheistic-and it can have little objective basis. But, as we saw when considering "s.e.xual Selection in Man" in the previous volume, more especially when a.n.a.lyzing the notion of beauty, we are justified in believing that beauty has to a large extent an objective basis, and that love by no means depends simply on the capricious selection of some individual fetich. The individual factor, as we saw, is but one of many factors which const.i.tute beauty. In the study of s.e.xual selection that individual factor was pa.s.sed over very lightly. We now see that it is often a factor of great importance, for in it are rooted all these outgrowths-normal in their germs, highly abnormal in their more extreme developments-which make up erotic symbolism.

Erotic symbolism is therefore concerned with all that is least generic, least specific, all that is most intimately personal and individual, in s.e.xual selection. It is the final point in which the decreasing circle of s.e.xual attractiveness is fixed. In the widest and most abstract form s.e.xual selection in man is merely human, and we are attracted to that which bears most fully the marks of humanity; in a less abstract form it is s.e.xual, and we are attracted to that which most vigorously presents the secondary s.e.xual characteristics; still narrowing, it is the type of our own nation and people that appeals most strongly to us in matters of love; and still further concentrating we are affected by the ideal-in civilization most often the somewhat exotic ideal-of our own day, the fas.h.i.+on of our own city. But the individual factor still remains, and amid the infinite possibilities of erotic symbolism the individual may evolve an ideal which is often, as far as he knows and perhaps in actuality, an absolutely unique event in the history of the human soul.

Erotic symbolism works in its finer manifestations by means of the idealizing apt.i.tudes; it is the field of s.e.xual psychology in which that faculty of crystallization, on which Stendhal loved to dwell, achieves its most brilliant results. In the solitary pa.s.sage in which we seem to see a smile on the face of the austere poet of the De Rerum Natura, Lucretius tells us how every lover, however he may be amused by the amorous extravagances of other men, is himself blinded by pa.s.sion: if his mistress is black she is a fascinating brunette, if she squints she is the rival of Pallas, if too tall she is majestic, if too short she is one of the Graces, tota merum sal; if too lean it is her delicate refinement, if too fat then a Ceres, dirty and she disdains adornment, a chatterer and brilliantly vivacious, silent and it is her exquisite modesty.[66] Sixteen hundred years later Robert Burton, when describing the symptoms of love, made out a long and appalling list of the physical defects which the lover is prepared to admire.[67]

Yet we must not be too certain that the lover is wrong in this matter. We too hastily a.s.sume that the casual and hasty judgment of the world is necessarily more reliable, more conformed to what we call "truth," than the judgment of the lover which is founded on absorbed and patient study. In some cases where there is lack of intelligence in the lover and dissimulation in the object of his love, it may be so. But even a poem or a picture will often not reveal its beauty except by the expenditure of time and study. It is foolish to expect that the secret beauty of a human person will reveal itself more easily. The lover is an artist, an artist who constructs an image, it is true, but only by patient and concentrated attention to nature; he knows the defects of his image, probably better than anyone, but he knows also that art lies, not in the avoidance of defects, but in the realization of those traits which swallow up defects and so render them non-existent. A great artist, Rodin, after a life spent in the study of Nature, has declared that for art there is no ugliness in Nature. "I have arrived at this belief by the study of Nature," he said; "I can only grasp the beauty of the soul by the beauty of the body, but some day one will come who will explain what I only catch a glimpse of and will declare how the whole earth is beautiful, and all human beings beautiful. I have never been able to say this in sculpture so well as I wish and as I feel it affirmed within me. For poets Beauty has always been some particular landscape, some particular woman; but it should be all women, all landscapes. A negro or a Mongol has his beauty, however remote from ours, and it must be the same with their characters. There is no ugliness. When I was young I made that mistake, as others do; I could not undertake a woman's bust unless I thought her pretty, according to my particular idea of beauty; to-day I should do the bust of any woman, and it would be just as beautiful. And however ugly a woman may look, when she is with her lover she becomes beautiful; there is beauty in her character, in her pa.s.sions, and beauty exists as soon as character or pa.s.sion becomes visible, for the body is a casting on which pa.s.sions are imprinted. And even without that, there is always the blood that flows in the veins and the air that fills the lungs."[68]

The saint, also, is here at one with the lover and the artist. The man who has so profoundly realized the worth of his fellow men that he is ready even to die in order to save them, feels that he has discovered a great secret. Cyples traces the "secret delights" that have thus risen in the hearts of holy men to the same source as the feelings generated between lovers, friends, parents, and children. "A few have at intervals walked in the world," he remarks, "who have, each in his own original way, found out this marvel.... Straightway man in general has become to them so sweet a thing that the infatuation has seemed to the rest of their fellows to be a celestial madness. Beggars' rags to their unhesitating lips grew fit for kissing, because humanity had touched the garb; there were no longer any menial acts, but only welcome services.... Remember by how much man is the subtlest circ.u.mstance in the world; at how many points he can attach relations.h.i.+ps; how manifold and perennial he is in his results. All other things are dull, meager, tame beside him."[69]

It may be added that even if we still believe that lover and artist and saint are drawing the main elements of their conceptions from the depths of their own consciousness, there is a sense in which they are coming nearer to the truth of things than those for whom their conceptions are mere illusions. The apt.i.tude for realizing beauty has involved an adjustment of the nerves and the a.s.sociated brain centers through countless ages that began before man was. When the vision of supreme beauty is slowly or suddenly realized by anyone, with a reverberation that extends throughout his organism, he has attained to something which for his species, and for far more than his species, is truth, and can only be illusion to one who has artificially placed himself outside the stream of life.

In an essay on "The G.o.ds as Apparitions of the Race-Life," Edward Carpenter, though in somewhat Platonic phraseology, thus well states the matter: "The youth sees the girl; it may be a chance face, a chance outline, amid the most ba.n.a.l surroundings. But it gives the cue. There is a memory, a confused reminiscence. The mortal figure without penetrates to the immortal figure within, and there rises into consciousness a s.h.i.+ning form, glorious, not belonging to this world, but vibrating with the agelong life of humanity, and the memory of a thousand love-dreams. The waking of this vision intoxicates the man; it glows and burns within him; a G.o.ddess (it may be Venus herself) stands in the sacred place of his temple; a sense of awe-struck splendor fills him, and the world is changed." "He sees something" (the same writer continues in a subsequent essay, "Beauty and Duty") "which, in a sense, is more real than the figures in the street, for he sees something that has lived and moved for hundreds of years in the heart of the race; something which has been one of the great formative influences of his own life, and which has done as much to create those very figures in the street as qualities in the circulation of the blood may do to form a finger or other limb. He comes into touch with a very real Presence or Power-one of those organic centers of growth in the life of humanity-and feels this larger life within himself, subjective, if you like, and yet intensely objective. And more. For is it not also evident that the woman, the mortal woman who excites his Vision, has some closest relation to it, and is, indeed, far more than a mere mask or empty formula which reminds him of it? For she indeed has within her, just as much as the man has, deep subconscious Powers working; and the ideal which has dawned so entrancingly on the man is in all probability closely related to that which has been working most powerfully in the heredity of the woman, and which has most contributed to mold her form and outline. No wonder, then, that her form should remind him of it. Indeed, when he looks into her eyes he sees through to a far deeper life even than she herself may be aware of, and yet which is truly hers-a life perennial and wonderful. The more than mortal in him beholds the more than mortal in her; and the G.o.ds descend to meet." (Edward Carpenter, The Art of Creation, pp. 137, 186.)

It is this mighty force which lies behind and beneath the aberrations we have been concerned with, a great reservoir from which they draw the life-blood that vivifies even their most fantastic shapes. Fetichism and the other forms of erotic symbolism are but the development and the isolation of the crystallizations which normally arise on the basis of s.e.xual selection. Normal in their basis, in their extreme forms they present the utmost pathological aberrations of the s.e.xual instinct which can be attained or conceived. In the intermediate s.p.a.ce all degrees are possible. In the slightest degree the symbol is merely a specially fascinating and beloved feature in a person who is, in all other respects, felt to be lovable; as such its recognition is a legitimate part of courts.h.i.+p, an effective aid to tumescence. In a further degree the symbol is the one arresting and attracting character of a person who must, however, still be felt as a s.e.xually attractive individual. In a still further degree of perversion the symbol is effective, even though the person with whom it is a.s.sociated is altogether unattractive. In the final stage the person and even all a.s.sociation with a person disappear altogether from the field of s.e.xual consciousness; the abstract symbol rules supreme.

Long, however, before the symbol has reached that final climax of morbid intensity we may be said to have pa.s.sed beyond the sphere of s.e.xual love. A person, not an abstracted quality, must be the goal of love. So long as the fetich is subordinated to the person it serves to heighten love. But love must be based on a complexus of attractive qualities, or it has no stability.[70] As soon as the fetich becomes isolated and omnipotent, so that the person sinks into the background as an unimportant appendage of the fetich, all stability is lost. The fetichist now follows an impersonal and abstract symbol withersoever it may lead him.

It has been seen that there are an extraordinary number of forms in which erotic symbolism may be felt. It must be remembered, and it cannot be too distinctly emphasized, that the links that bind together the forms of erotic symbolism are not to be found in objects or even in acts, but in the underlying emotion. A feeling is the first condition of the symbol, a feeling which recalls, by a subtle and unconscious automatic a.s.sociation of resemblance or of contiguity, some former feeling. It is the similarity of emotion, instinctively apprehended, which links on a symbol only partially s.e.xual, or even apparently not s.e.xual at all, to the great central focus of s.e.xual emotion, the great dominating force which brings the symbol its life-blood.[71]

The cases of s.e.xual hyperaesthesia, quoted at the beginning of this study, do but present in a morbidly comprehensive and sensitive form those possibilities of erotic symbolism which, in some degree, or at some period, are latent in most persons. They are genuinely instinctive and automatic, and have nothing in common with that fanciful and deliberate play of the intelligence around s.e.xual imagery-not infrequently seen in abnormal and insane persons-which has no significance for s.e.xual psychology.

It is to the extreme individualization involved by the developments of erotic symbolism that the fetichist owes his morbid and perilous isolation. The lover who is influenced by all the elements of s.e.xual selection is always supported by the fellow-feeling of a larger body of other human beings; he has behind him his species, his s.e.x, his nation, or at the very least a fas.h.i.+on. Even the inverted lover in most cases is soon able to create around him an atmosphere const.i.tuted by persons whose ideals resemble his own. But it is not so with the erotic symbolist. He is nearly always alone. He is predisposed to isolation from the outset, for it would seem to be on a basis of excessive shyness and timidity that the manifestations of erotic symbolism are most likely to develop. When at length the symbolist realizes his own aspirations-which seem to him for the most part an altogether new phenomenon in the world-and at the same time realizes the wide degree in which they deviate from those of the rest of mankind, his natural secretiveness is still further reinforced. He stands alone. His most sacred ideals are for all those around him a childish absurdity, or a disgusting obscenity, possibly a matter calling for the intervention of the policeman. We have forgotten that all these impulses which to us seem so unnatural-this adoration of the foot and other despised parts of the body, this reverence for the excretory acts and products, the acceptance of congress with animals, the solemnity of self-exhibition-were all beliefs and practices which, to our remote forefathers, were bound up with the highest conceptions of life and the deepest ardors of religion.

A man cannot, however, deviate at once so widely and so spontaneously in his impulses from the rest of the world in which he himself lives without possessing an aboriginally abnormal temperament. At the very least he exhibits a neuropathic sensitiveness to abnormal impressions. Not infrequently there is more than this, the distinct stigmata of degeneration, sometimes a certain degree of congenital feeble-mindedness or a tendency to insanity.

Yet, regarded as a whole, and notwithstanding the frequency with which they witness to congenital morbidity, the phenomena of erotic symbolism can scarcely fail to be profoundly impressive to the patient and impartial student of the human soul. They often seem absurd, sometimes disgusting, occasionally criminal; they are always, when carried to an extreme degree, abnormal. But of all the manifestations of s.e.xual psychology, normal and abnormal, they are the most specifically human. More than any others they involve the potently plastic force of the imagination. They bring before us the individual man, not only apart from his fellows, but in opposition, himself creating his own paradise. They const.i.tute the supreme triumph of human idealism.

[64]

Binet, Etudes de Psychologie Experimentale, esp., p. 84; Krafft-Ebing, Op. cit., p. 18.

[65]

G. Tarde, "L'Amour Morbide," Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle, 1890, p. 585.

[66]

Lucretius, Lib. IV, vv. 1150-1163.