STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX, VOLUME V
Erotic Symbolism
The Mechanism of Detumescence
The Psychic State in Pregnancy
By HAVELOCK ELLIS
1927
PREFACE.
In this volume the terminal phenomena of the sexual process are discussed,
before an attempt is finally made, in the concluding volume, to consider
the bearings of the psychology of sex on that part of morals which may be
called "social hygiene."
Under "Erotic Symbolism" I include practically all the aberrations of the
sexual instinct, although some of these have seemed of sufficient
importance for separate discussion in previous volumes.
It is highly
probable that many readers will consider that the name scarcely suffices
to cover manifestations so numerous and so varied. The term "sexual
equivalents" will seem preferable to some. While, however, it may be fully
admitted that these perversions are "sexual equivalents"--or at all events
equivalents of the normal sexual impulse--that term is merely a
descriptive label which tells us nothing of the phenomena. "Sexual
Symbolism" gives us the key to the process, the key that makes all these
perversions intelligible. In all of them--very clearly in some, as in
shoe-fetichism; more obscurely in others, as in exhibitionism--it has come
about by causes congenital, acquired, or both, that some object or class
of objects, some act or group of acts, has acquired a dynamic power over
the psycho-physical mechanism of the sexual process, deflecting it from
its normal adjustment to the whole of a beloved person of the opposite
sex. There has been a transmutation of values, and certain objects,
certain acts, have acquired an emotional value which for the normal person
they do not possess. Such objects and acts are properly, it seems to me,
termed symbols, and that term embodies the only justification that in most
cases these manifestations can legitimately claim.
"The Mechanism of Detumescence" brings us at last to the final climax for
which the earlier and more prolonged stage of tumescence, which has
occupied us so often in these _Studies_, is the elaborate preliminary.
"The art of love," a clever woman novelist has written,
"is the art of
preparation." That "preparation" is, on the physiological side, the
production of tumescence, and all courtship is concerned in building up
tumescence. But the final conjugation of two individuals in an explosion
of detumescence, thus slowly brought about, though it is largely an
involuntary act, is still not without its psychological implications and
consequences; and it is therefore a matter for regret that so little is
yet known about it. The one physiological act in which two individuals are
lifted out of all ends that center in self and become the instrument of
those higher forces which fashion the species, can never be an act to be
slurred over as trivial or unworthy of study.
In the brief study of "The Psychic State in Pregnancy"
we at last touch
the point at which the whole complex process of sex reaches its goal. A
woman with a child in her womb is the everlasting miracle which all the
romance of love, all the cunning devices of tumescence and detumescence,
have been invented to make manifest. The psychic state of the woman who
thus occupies the supreme position which life has to offer cannot fail to
be of exceeding interest from many points of view, and not least because
the maternal instinct is one of the elements even of love between the
sexes. But the psychology of pregnancy is full of involved problems, and
here again, as so often in the wide field we have traversed, we stand at
the threshold of a door it is not yet given us to pass.
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
Carbis Water, Lelant, Cornwall.
CONTENTS.
EROTIC SYMBOLISM.
I.
The Definition of Erotic Symbolism. Symbolism of Act and Symbolism of
Object. Erotic Fetichism. Wide Extension of the Symbols of Sex. The
Immense Variety of Possible Erotic Fetiches. The Normal Foundations of
Erotic Symbolism. Classification of the Phenomena. The Tendency to
Idealize the Defects of a Beloved Person. Stendhal's
"Crystallization".
II.
Foot-fetichism and Shoe-fetichism. Wide Prevalence and Normal Basis.
Restif de la Bretonne. The Foot a Normal Focus of Sexual Attraction Among
Some Peoples. The Chinese, Greeks, Romans, Spaniards, etc. The Congenital
Predisposition in Erotic Symbolism. The Influence of Early Association and
Emotional Shock. Shoe-fetichism in Relation to Masochism. The Two
Phenomena Independent Though Allied. The Desire to be Trodden On. The
Fascination of Physical Constraint. The Symbolism of Self-inflicted Pain.
The Dynamic Element in Erotic Symbolism. The Symbolism of Garments.
III.
Scatalogic Symbolism. Urolagnia. Coprolagnia. The Ascetic Attitude Towards
the Flesh. Normal Basis of Scatalogic Symbolism.
Scatalogic Conceptions
Among Primitive Peoples. Urine as a Primitive Holy Water. Sacredness of
Animal Excreta. Scatalogy in Folk-lore. The Obscene as Derived from the
Mythological. The Immature Sexual Impulse Tends to Manifest Itself in
Scatalogic Forms. The Basis of Physiological Connection Between the
Urinary and Genital Spheres. Urinary Fetichism Sometimes Normal in
Animals. The Urolagnia of Masochists. The Scatalogy of Saints. Urolagnia
More Often a Symbolism of Act Than a Symbolism of Object. Only
Occasionally an Olfactory Fetichism. Comparative Rarity of Coprolagnia.
Influence of Nates Fetichism as a Transition to Coprolagnia, Ideal
Coprolagnia. Olfactory Coprolagnia. Urolagnia and Coprolagnia as Symbols
of Coitus.
IV.
Animals as Sources of Erotic Symbolism. Mixoscopic Zoophilia. The
Stuff-fetichisms. Hair-fetichism. The Stuff-fetichisms Mainly on a Tactile
Base. Erotic Zoophilia. Zooerastia. Bestiality. The Conditions that Favor
Bestiality. Its Wide Prevalence Among Primitive Peoples and Among
Peasants. The Primitive Conception of Animals. The Goat.
The Influence of
Familiarity With Animals. Congress Between Women and Animals. The Social
Reaction Against Bestiality.
V.
Exhibitionism. Illustrative Cases. A Symbolic Perversion of Courtship. The
Impulse to Defile. The Exhibitionist's Psychic Attitude.
The Sexual Organs
as Fetiches. Phallus Worship. Adolescent Pride in Sexual Development.
Exhibitionism of the Nates. The Classification of the Forms of
Exhibitionism. Nature of the Relationship of Exhibitionism to Epilepsy.
VI.
The Forms of Erotic Symbolism are Simulacra of Coitus.
Wide Extension of
Erotic Symbolism. Fetichism Not Covering the Whole Ground of Sexual
Selection. It is Based on the Individual Factor in Selection.
Crystallization. The Lover and the Artist. The Key to Erotic Symbolism is
to be Found in the Emotional Sphere. The Passage to Pathological Extremes.
THE MECHANISM OF DETUMESCENCE.
I.
The Psychological Significance of Detumescence. The Testis and the Ovary.
Sperm Cell and Germ Cell. Development of the Embryo. The External Sexual
Organs. Their Wide Range of Variation. Their Nervous Supply. The Penis.
Its Racial Variations. The Influence of Exercise. The Scrotum and
Testicles. The Mons Veneris. The Vulva. The Labia Majora and their
Varieties. The Public Hair and Its Characters. The Clitoris and Its
Functions. The Anus as an Erogenous Zone. The Nymphæ and their Function.
The Vagina. The Hymen. Virginity. The Biological Significance of the
Hymen.
II.
The Object of Detumescence. Erogenous Zones. The Lips.
The Vascular
Characters of Detumescence. Erectile Tissue. Erection in Woman. Mucous
Emission in Women. Sexual Connection. The Human Mode of Intercourse.
Normal Variations. The Motor Characters of Detumescence.
Ejaculation. The
Virile Reflex. The General Phenomena of Detumescence.
The Circulatory and
Respiratory Phenomena. Blood Pressure. Cardiac Disturbance. Glandular
Activity. Distillatio. The Essentially Motor Character of Detumescence.
Involuntary Muscular Irradiation to Bladder, etc. Erotic Intoxication.
Analogy of Sexual Detumescence and Vesical Tension. The Specifically
Sexual Movements of Detumescence in Man. In Woman. The Spontaneous
Movements of the Genital Canal in Woman. Their Function in Conception.
Part Played by Active Movement of the Spermatozoa. The Artificial
Injection of Semen. The Facial Expression During Detumescence. The
Expression of Joy. The Occasional Serious Effects of Coitus.
III.
The Constituents of Semen. Function of the Prostate. The Properties of
Semen. Aphrodisiacs. Alcohol, Opium, etc.
Anaphrodisiacs. The Stimulant
Influence of Semen in Coitus. The Internal Effects of Testicular
Secretions. The Influence of Ovarian Secretion.
IV.
The Aptitude for Detumescence. Is There an Erotic Temperament? The
Available Standards of Comparison. Characteristics of the Castrated.
Characteristics of Puberty. Characteristics of the State of Detumescence.
Shortness of Stature. Development of the Secondary Sexual Characters. Deep
Voice. Bright Eyes. Glandular Activity. Everted Lips.
Pigmentation.
Profuse Hair. Dubious Significance of Many of These Characters.
THE PSYCHIC STATE IN PREGNANCY.
The Relationship of Maternal and Sexual Emotion.
Conception and Loss of
Virginity. The Anciently Accepted Signs of This Condition. The Pervading
Effects of Pregnancy on the Organism. Pigmentation. The Blood and
Circulation. The Thyroid. Changes in the Nervous System.
The Vomiting of
Pregnancy. The Longings of Pregnant Women. Mental Impressions. Evidence
for and Against Their Validity. The Question Still Open.
Imperfection of
Our Knowledge. The Significance of Pregnancy.
APPENDIX.
Histories of Sexual Development.
INDEX OF AUTHORS.
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
EROTIC SYMBOLISM.
I.
The Definition of Erotic Symbolism--Symbolism of Act and Symbolism of
Object--Erotic Fetichism--Wide extension of the symbols of Sex--The
Immense Variety of Possible Erotic Fetiches--The Normal Foundations of
Erotic Symbolism--Classification of the Phenomena--The Tendency to
Idealize the Defects of a Beloved 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 such, but at the
same time are often treated as symbols of inner experiences, and
a meaning read into them which they would not otherwise possess.
Symbolism or fetichism is, indeed, just the capacity to see
meaning, to emphasize something for the sake of other things
which do not appear. In brain terms it indicates an activity of
the higher centers, a sort of side-tracking or long-circuiting of
the primitive energy; ... Rosetti's poem, 'The Woodspurge,'
gives a concrete example of the formation of such a symbol. Here
the otherwise insignificant presentation of the three-cupped
woodspurge, representing originally a mere side-current of the
stream of consciousness, becomes the intellectual symbol or
fetich of the whole psychosis forever after. It seems, indeed, as
if the stronger the emotion the more likely will become the
formation of an overlying symbolism, which serves to focus and
stand in the place of something greater than itself; nowhere at
least is symbolism a more characteristic feature than as an
expression of the sexual instinct. The passion of sex, with its
immense hereditary background, in early man became centered often
upon the most trivial and unimportant features....
This
symbolism, now become fetichistic, or symbolic in a bad sense, is
at least an exercise of the increasing representative power of
man, upon which so much of his advancement has depended, while it
also served to express and help to purify his most perennial
emotion." (Colin Scott, "Sex and Art," _American Journal of
Psychology_, vol. vii, No. 2, p. 189.) In the study of "Love and Pain" in a previous volume, the analysis of the
large and complex mass of sexual phenomena which are associated with pain,
gradually resolved them to a considerable extent into a special case of
erotic symbolism; pain or restraint, whether inflicted on or by the loved
person, becomes, by a psychic process that is usually unconscious, the
symbol of the sexual mechanism, and hence arouses the same emotions as
that mechanism normally arouses. We may now attempt to deal more broadly
and comprehensively with the normal and abnormal aspects of erotic
symbolism in some of their most typical and least mixed forms.
"When our human imagination seeks to animate artificial things," Huysmans
writes in _Là-bas_, "it is compelled to reproduce the movements of animals
in the act of propagation. Look at machines, at the play of pistons in the
cylinders; they are Romeos of steel in Juliets of cast-iron." And not only
in the work of man's hands but throughout Nature we find sexual symbols
which are the less deniable since, for the most part, they make not the
slightest appeal to even the most morbid human imagination. Language is
full of metaphorical symbols of sex which constantly tend to lose their
poetic symbolism and to become commonplace. Semen is but seed, and for the
Latins especially the whole process of human sex, as well as the male and
female organs, constantly presented itself in symbols derived from
agricultural and horticultural life. The testicles were beans (_fabæ_) and
fruit or apples (_poma_ and _mala_); the penis was a tree (_arbor_), or a
stalk (_thyrsus_), or a root (_radix_), or a sickle (_falx_), or a
ploughshare (_vomer_). The semen, again, was dew (_ros_). The labia majora
or minora were wings (_alæ_); the vulva and vagina were a field (_ager_
and _campus_), or a ploughed furrow (_sulcus_), or a vineyard (_vinea_),
or a fountain (_fons_), while the pudendal hair was herbage
(_plantaria_).[4] In other languages it is not difficult to trace similar
and even identical imagery applied to sexual organs and sexual acts. Thus
it is noteworthy that Shakespeare more than once applies the term
"ploughed" to a woman who has had sexual intercourse.
The Talmud calls the
labia minora the doors, the labia majora hinges, and the clitoris the key.
The Greeks appear not only to have found in the myrtle-berry, the fruit of
a plant sacred to Venus, the image of the clitoris, but also in the rose
an image of the feminine labia; in the poetic literature of many
countries, indeed, this imagery of the rose may be traced in a more or
less veiled manner.[5]
The widespread symbolism of sex arose in the theories and conceptions of
primitive peoples concerning the function of generation and its nearest
analogies in Nature; it was continued for the sake of the vigorous and
expressive terminology which it furnished both for daily life and for
literature; its final survivals were cultivated because they furnished a
delicately æsthetic method of approaching matters which a growing
refinement of sentiment made it difficult for lovers and poets to approach
in a more crude and direct manner. Its existence is of interest to us now
because it shows the objective validity of the basis on which erotic
symbolism, as we have here to understand it, develops.
But from first to
last it is a distinct phenomenon, having a more or less reasoned and
intellectual basis, and it scarcely serves in any degree to feed the
sexual impulse. Erotic symbolism is not intellectual but emotional in its
origin; it starts into being, obscurely, with but a dim consciousness or
for the most part none at all, either suddenly from the shock of some
usually youthful experience, or more gradually through an instinctive
brooding on those things which are most intimately associated with a
sexually desirable person.
The kind of soil on which the germs of erotic symbolism may
develop is well seen in cases of sexual hyperæsthesia. In such
cases all the emotionally sexual analogies and resemblances,
which in erotic symbolism are fixed and organized, may be traced
in vague and passing forms, a single hyperæsthetic individual
perhaps presenting a great variety of germinal symbolisms.
Thus it has been recorded of an Italian nun (whose sister became
a prostitute) that from the age of 8 she had desire for coitus,
from the age of 10 masturbated, and later had homosexual
feelings, that the same feelings and practices continued after
she had taken the veil, though from time to time they assumed
religious equivalents. The mere contact, indeed, of a priest's
hand, the news of the presentation of an ecclesiastic she had
known to a bishopric, the sight of an ape, the contemplation of
the crucified Christ, the figure of a toy, the picture of a
demon, the act of defecation in the children entrusted to her
care (whom, on this account, and against the regulations, she
would accompany to the closets), especially the sight and the
mere recollection of flies in sexual connection--all these things
sufficed to produce in her a powerful orgasm.
(_Archivio di
Psichiatria_, 1902, fasc. II-III, p. 338.) A boy of 15 (given to masturbation), studied by Macdonald in
America, was similarly hyperæsthetic to the symbols of sexual
emotion. "I lik