Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 | Page 3

Person--Stendhal's "Crystallization."

By "erotic symbolism" I mean that tendency whereby the lover's
attention is diverted from the central focus of sexual attraction to some
object or process which is on the periphery of that focus, or is even
outside of it altogether, though recalling it by association of contiguity
or of similarity. It thus happens that tumescence, or even in extreme
cases detumescence, may be provoked by the contemplation of acts or
objects which are away from the end of sexual conjugation.[1]
In considering the phenomena of sexual selection in a previous
volume,[2] it was found that there are four or five main factors in the
constitution of beauty in so far as beauty determines sexual selection.
Erotic symbolism is founded on the factor of individual taste in beauty;
it arises as a specialized development of that factor, but it is,
nevertheless, incorrect to merge it in sexual selection. The attractive
characteristics of a beloved woman or man, from the point of view of
sexual selection, are a complex but harmonious whole leading up to a
desire for the complete possession of the person who displays them.
There is no tendency to isolate and dissociate any single character from
the individual and to concentrate attention upon that character at the
expense of the attention bestowed upon the individual generally. As
soon as such a tendency begins to show itself, even though only in a
slight or temporary form, we may say that there is erotic symbolism.
Erotic symbolism is, however, by no means confined to the
individualizing tendency to concentrate amorous attention upon some
single characteristic of the adult woman or man who is normally the
object of sexual love. The adult human being may not be concerned at
all, the attractive object or act may not even be human, not even animal,
and we may still be concerned with a symbol which has parasitically
rooted itself on the fruitful site of sexual emotion and absorbed to itself
the energy which normally goes into the channels of healthy human
love having for its final end the procreation of the species. Thus
understood in its widest sense, it may be said that every sexual
perversion, even homosexuality, is a form of erotic symbolism, for we
shall find that in every case some object or act that for the normal
human being has little or no erotic value, has assumed such value in a
supreme degree; that is to say, it has become a symbol of the normal

object of love. Certain perversions are, however, of such great
importance on account of their wide relationships, that they cannot be
adequately discussed merely as forms of erotic symbolism. This is
notably the case as regards homosexuality, auto-erotism, and algolagnia,
all of which phenomena have therefore been separately discussed in
previous studies. We are now mainly concerned with manifestations
which are more narrowly and exclusively symbolical.
A portion of the field of erotic symbolism is covered by what Binet
(followed by Lombroso, Krafft-Ebing, and others) has termed "erotic
fetichism," or the tendency whereby sexual attraction is unduly exerted
by some special part or peculiarity of the body, or by some inanimate
object which has become associated with it. Such erotic symbolism of
object cannot, however, be dissociated from the even more important
erotic symbolism of process, and the two are so closely bound together
that we cannot attain a truly scientific view of them until we regard
them broadly as related parts of a common psychic tendency. If, as
Groos asserts,[3] a symbol has two chief meanings, one in which it
indicates a physical process which stands for a psychic process, and
another in which it indicates a part which represents the whole, erotic
symbolism of act corresponds to the first of these chief meanings, and
erotic symbolism of object to the other.
Although it is not impossible to find some germs of erotic symbolism
in animals, in its more pronounced manifestations it is only found in
the human species. It could not be otherwise, for such symbolism
involves not only the play of fancy and imagination, the idealizing
aptitude, but also a certain amount of power of concentrating the
attention on a point outside the natural path of instinct and the ability to
form new mental constructions around that point. There are, indeed, as
we shall see, elementary forms of erotic symbolism which are not
uncommonly associated with feeble-mindedness, but even these are
still peculiarly human, and in its less crude manifestations erotic
symbolism easily lends itself to every degree of human refinement and
intelligence.
"It depends primarily upon an increase of the psychological process of

representation," Colin Scott remarks of sexual symbolism generally,
"involving greater powers of comparison and analysis as compared
with the lower animals. The outer impressions come to be clearly
distinguished as