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strange and eccentric form--on a basis of association through resemblance
or contiguity or both combined--there arises a definite mimicry of the
normal sexual 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 sexual 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, _Sexual 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 homosexual impulse, as the dynamic psychic action
of an olfactory sexual symbol in a transformed form.
We seem to have here a psychic process which is a curious
reversal of that process of _Einfühlung_--the projection of one's
own activities into the object contemplated--which Lipps has so
fruitfully developed as the essence of every æsthetic condition.
(T. Lipps, _Æsthetik_, Teil I, 1903.) By _Einfühlung_ our own
interior activity becomes the activity of the object perceived,
a thing being beautiful in proportion as it lends itself to our
_Einfühlung_. 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
relationship--as a state of intense emotional excitement--may, under a
great variety of special circumstances, become an erotic symbol and afford
the same relief as the emotions normally accompanying the sexual act.
Active algolagnia or sadism is thus a form of erotic symbolism; passive
algolagnia or masochism is (in a man) an inverted form of erotic
symbolism. Active flagellation or passive 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
sexual 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 sexual 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 "Sexual
Selection in Man" in the previous volume, more especially when analyzing
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 constitute beauty. In
the study of sexual selection that individual factor was passed 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
sexual selection. It is the final point in which the decreasing circle of
sexual attractiveness is fixed. In the widest and most abstract form
sexual 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 sexual, and we are attracted to that which most vigorously presents the
secondary sexual 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
fashion 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 aptitudes; it is the field of sexual psychology in which that
faculty of crystallization, on which Stendhal loved to dwell, achieves its
most brilliant results. In the solitary passage in which we seem to see a
smile on the face of the austere poet of the _De Rerum Naturâ_, Lucretius
tells us how every lover, however he may be amused by the amorous
extravagances of other men, is himself blinded by passion: 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 assume 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 passions, and beauty exists as soon as character or passion becomes
visible, for the body is a casting on which passions 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 circumstance in the world; at how many points he can attach
relationships; 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 aptitude for realizing beauty has involved an
adjustment of the nerves and the associated 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 Gods 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 banal 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 shining 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
goddess (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 gods 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
sexual selection. Normal in their basis, in their extreme forms they
present the utmost pathological aberrations of the sexual instinct which
can be attained or conceived. In the intermediate space 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
courtship, 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 sexually attractive individual. In a still
further degree of perversion the symbol is effective, even though the
person with whom it is associated is altogether unattractive. In the final
stage the person and even all association with a person disappear
altogether from the field of sexual 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 passed beyond the sphere of sexual 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 association
of resemblance or of contiguity, some former feeling. It is the similarity
of emotion, instinctively apprehended, which links on a symbol only
partially sexual, or even apparently not sexual at all, to the great
central focus of sexual emotion, the great dominating force which brings
the symbol its life-blood.[71]
The cases of sexual hyperæsthesia, 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 sexual imagery--not infrequently seen in
abnormal and insane persons--which has no significance for sexual
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 sexual
selection is always supported by the fellow-feeling of a larger body of
other human beings; he has behind him his species, his sex, his nation, or
at the very least a fashion. Even the inverted lover in most cases is soon
able to create around him an atmosphere constituted 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 sexual 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 constitute the supreme triumph of
human idealism.
FOOTNOTES:
[64] Binet, _Etudes de Psychologie Expérimentale_, 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.
[67] Burton, _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Part III, Section II, Mem. III,
Subs. I.
[68] Judith Cladel, _Auguste Rodin Pris sur la Vie_, 1903, pp. 103-104.
Some slight modifications have been made in the translation of this
passage on account of the conversational form of the original.
[69] W. Cyples, _The Process of Human Experience_, p.
462. Even if (as we
have already seen, _ante_, p. 58) the saint cannot always feel actual
physical pleasure in the intimate contact of humanity, the ardor of
devoted service which his vision of humanity arouses remains unaffected.
[70] "To love," as Stendhal defined it (_De l'Amour_, Chapter II), "is to
have pleasure in seeing, touching, and feeling by all the senses, and as
near as possible, a beloved object by whom one is oneself loved."
[71] Pillon's study of "La Mémoire Affective" (_Revue Philosophique_,
February, 1901) helps to explain the psychic mechanism of the process.
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 Pubic 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.
In analyzing the sexual impulse we have seen that the process whereby the
conjunction of the sexes is achieved falls naturally into two phases: the
first phase, of tumescence, during which force is generated in the
organism, and the second phase, of detumescence, in which that force is
discharged during conjugation.[72] Hitherto we have been occupied mainly
with the first phase, that of tumescence, and with its associated psychic
phenomena. It was inevitable that this should be so, for it is during the
slow process of tumescence that sexual selection is decided, the
crystallizations of love elaborated, and, to a large extent, the
individual erotic symbols determined. But we can by no means altogether
pass over the final phase of detumescence. Its consideration, it is true,
brings us directly into the field of anatomy and physiology; while
tumescence is largely under control of the will, when the moment of
detumescence arrives the reins slip from the control of the will; the more
fundamental and uncontrollable impulses of the organism gallop on
unchecked; the chariot of Phaëthon dashes blindly down into a sea of
emotion.
Yet detumescence is the end and climax of the whole drama; it is an
anatomico-physiological process, certainly, but one that inevitably
touches psychology at every point.[73] It is, indeed, the very key to the
process of tumescence, and unless we understand and realize very precisely
what it is that happens during detumescence, our psychological analysis of
the sexual impulse must