Read Ebook: Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume 5 Erotic Symbolism; The Mechanism of Detumescence; The Psychic State in Pregnancy by Ellis Havelock

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EROTIC SYMBOLISM.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Nymphae and their Function. The Vagina. The Hymen. Virginity. The Biological Significance of the Hymen.

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.

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.

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.

Histories of Sexual Development.

INDEX OF SUBJECTS.

EROTIC SYMBOLISM.

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."

In considering the phenomena of sexual selection in a previous volume, 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 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, 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."

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.

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 aesthetic 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 hyperaesthesia. 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 hyperaesthetic individual perhaps presenting a great variety of germinal symbolisms.

Thus it has been recorded of an Italian nun 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 , especially the sight and the mere recollection of flies in sexual connection--all these things sufficed to produce in her a powerful orgasm.

A boy of 15 , studied by Macdonald in America, was similarly hyperaesthetic to the symbols of sexual emotion. "I like amusing myself with my comrades," he told Macdonald, "rolling ourselves into a ball, which gives one a funny kind of warmth. I have a special pleasure in talking about some things. It is the same when the governess kisses me on saying good night or when I lean against her breast. I have that sensation, too, when I see some of the pictures in the comic papers, but only in those representing a woman, as when a young man skating trips up a girl so that her clothes are raised a little. When I read how a man saved a young girl from drowning, so that they swam together, I had the same sensation. Looking at the statues of women in the museum produces the same effect, or when I see naked babies, or when a mother suckles a child. I have often had that sensation when reading novels I ought not to read, or when looking at a new-born calf, or seeing dogs and cows and horses mounting on each other. When I see a girl flirting with a boy, or leaning on his shoulder or with his arm round her waist, I have an erection. It is the same when I see women and little girls in bathing costume, or when boys talk of what their fathers and mothers do together. In the Natural History Museum I often see things which give me that sensation. One day when I read how a man killed a young girl and carried her into a wood and undressed her I had a feeling of enjoyment. When I read of men who were bastards the idea of a woman having a child in that way gives me this sensation. Some dances, and seeing young girls astride a horse, excited me, too, and so in a circus when a woman was shot out of a cannon and her skirts flew in the air. It has no effect on me when I see men naked. Sometimes I enjoy seeing women's underclothes in a shop, or when I see a lady or a girl buying them, especially if they are drawers. When I saw a lady in a dress which buttoned from top to bottom it had more effect on me than seeing underclothes. Seeing dogs coupling gives me more pleasure than looking at pretty women, but less than looking at pretty little girls." In order of increasing intensity he placed the phenomena that affected him thus: The coupling of flies, then of horses, then the sight of women's undergarments, then a boy and a girl flirting, then cows mounting on each other, the statues of women with naked breasts, then contact with the governess's body and breasts, finally coitus.

It is worthy of remark that the instinct of nutrition, when restrained, may exhibit something of an analogous symbolism, though in a minor degree, to that of sex. The ways in which a hyperaesthetic hunger may seek its symbols are illustrated in the case of a young woman called Nadia, who during several years was carefully studied by Janet. It is a case of obsession , simulating hysterical anorexia, in which the patient, for fear of getting fat, reduced her nourishment to the smallest possible amount. "Nadia is generally hungry, even very hungry. One can tell this by her actions; from time to time she forgets herself to such an extent as to devour greedily anything she can put her hands on. At other times, when she cannot resist the desire to eat, she secretly takes a biscuit. She feels horrible remorse for the action, but, all the same, she does it again. Her confidences are very curious. She recognizes that a great effort is needed to avoid eating, and considers she is a heroine to resist so long. 'Sometimes I spent whole hours in thinking about food, I was so hungry; I swallowed my saliva, I bit my handkerchief, I rolled on the floor, I wanted to eat so badly. I would look in books for descriptions of meals and feasts, and tried to deceive my hunger by imagining that I was sharing all these good things,'" The deviations of the instinct of nutrition are, however, confined within narrow limits, and, in the nature of things, hunger, unlike sexual desire, cannot easily accept a fetich.

"There is almost no feature, article of dress, attitude, act," Stanley Hall declares, "or even animal or perhaps object in nature, that may not have to some morbid soul specialized erogenic and erethic power." Even a mere shadow may become a fetich. Goron tells of a merchant in Paris--a man with a reputation for ability, happily married and the father of a family, altogether irreproachable in his private life--who was returning home one evening after a game of billiards with a friend, when, on chancing to raise his eyes, he saw against a lighted window the shadow of a woman changing her chemise. He fell in love with that shadow and returned to the spot every evening for many months to gaze at the window. Yet--and herein lies the fetichism--he made no attempt to see the woman or to find out who she was; the shadow sufficed; he had no need of the realty. It is even possible to have a negative fetich, the absence of some character being alone demanded, and the case has been recorded in Chicago of an American gentleman of average intelligence, education, and good habits who, having as a boy cherished a pure affection for a girl whose leg had been amputated, throughout life was relatively impotent with normal women, but experienced passion and affection for women who had lost a leg; he was found by his wife to be in extensive correspondence with one-legged women all over the country, expending no little money on the purchase of artificial legs for his various proteg?es.

It is important to remember, however, that while erotic symbolism becomes fantastic and abnormal in its extreme manifestations, it is in its essence absolutely normal. It is only in the very grossest forms of sexual desire that it is altogether absent. Stendhal described the mental side of the process of tumescence as a crystallization, a process whereby certain features of the beloved person present points around which the emotions held in solution in the lover's mind may concentrate and deposit themselves in dazzling brilliance. This process inevitably tends to take place around all those features and objects associated with the beloved person which have most deeply impressed the lover's mind, and the more sensitive and imaginative and emotional he is the more certainly will such features and objects crystallize into erotic symbols. "Devotion and love," wrote Mary Wollstonecraft, "may be allowed to hallow the garments as well as the person, for the lover must want fancy who has not a sort of sacred respect for the glove or slipper of his mistress. He would not confound them with vulgar things of the same kind." And nearly two centuries earlier Burton, who had gathered together so much of the ancient lore of love, clearly asserted the entirely normal character of erotic symbolism. "Not one of a thousand falls in love," he declares, "but there is some peculiar part or other which pleaseth most, and inflames him above the rest.... If he gets any remnant of hers, a busk-point, a feather of her fan, a shoe-tie, a lace, a ring, a bracelet of hair, he wears it for a favor on his arm, in his hat, finger, or next his heart; as Laodamia did by Protesilaus, when he went to war, sit at home with his picture before her: a garter or a bracelet of hers is more precious than any Saint's Relique, he lays it up in his casket and every day will kiss it: if in her presence his eye is never off her, and drink he will where she drank, if it be possible, in that very place," etc.

The tendency to treasure the relics of a beloved person, more especially the garments, is the simplest and commonest foundation of erotic symbolism. It is without doubt absolutely normal. It is inevitable that those objects which have been in close contact with the beloved person's body, and are intimately associated with that person in the lover's mind, should possess a little of the same virtue, the same emotional potency. It is a phenomenon closely analogous to that by which the relics of saints are held to possess a singular virtue. But it becomes somewhat less normal when the garment is regarded as essential even in the presence of the beloved person.

While an extremely large number of objects and acts may be found to possess occasionally the value of erotic symbols, such symbols most frequently fall into certain well-defined groups. A vast number of isolated objects or acts may be exceptionally the focus of erotic contemplation, but the objects and acts which frequently become thus symbolic are comparatively few.

It seems to me that the phenomena of erotic symbolism may be most conveniently grouped in three great classes, on the basis of the objects or acts which arouse them.

Although the three main groups into which the phenomena of erotic symbolism are here divided may seem fairly distinct, they are yet very closely allied, and indeed overlap, so that it is possible, as we shall see, for a single complex symbol to fall into all three groups.

A very complete kind of erotic symbolism is furnished by Pygmalionism or the love of statues. It is exactly analogous to the child's love of a doll, which is also a form of sexual symbolism. In a somewhat less abnormal form, erotic symbolism probably shows itself in its simplest shape in the tendency to idealize unbeautiful peculiarities in a beloved person, so that such peculiarities are ever afterward almost or quite essential in order to arouse sexual attraction. In this way men have become attracted to limping women. Even the most normal man may idealize a trifling defect in a beloved woman. The attention is inevitably concentrated on any such slight deviation from regular beauty, and the natural result of such concentration is that a complexus of associated thoughts and emotions becomes attached to something that in itself is unbeautiful. A defect becomes an admired focus of attention, the embodied symbol of the lover's emotion.

Thus a mole is not in itself beautiful, but by the tendency to erotic symbolism it becomes so. Persian poets especially have lavished the richest imagery on moles ; the Arabs, as Lane remarks , are equally extravagant in their admiration of a mole.

In the tendency to idealize the unbeautiful features of a beloved person erotic symbolism shows itself in a simple and normal form. In a less simple and more morbid form it appears in persons in whom the normal paths of sexual gratification are for some reasons inhibited, and who are thus led to find the symbols of natural love in unnatural perversions. It is for this reason that so many erotic symbolisms take root in childhood and puberty, before the sexual instincts have reached full development. It is for the same reason also, that, at the other end of life, when the sexual energies are failing, erotic symbols sometimes tend to be substituted for the normal pleasures of sex. It is for this reason, again, that both men and women whose normal energies are inhibited sometimes find the symbols of sexual gratification in the caresses of children.

The case of a schoolmistress recorded by Penta instructively shows how an erotic symbolism of this last kind may develop by no means as a refinement of vice, but as the one form in which sexual gratification becomes possible when normal gratification has been pathologically inhibited. F.R., aged 48, schoolmistress; she was some years ago in an asylum with religious mania, but came out well in a few months. At the age of 12 she had first experienced sexual excitement in a railway train from the jolting of the carriage. Soon after she fell in love with a youth who represented her ideal and who returned her affection. When, however, she gave herself to him, great was her disillusion and surprise to find that the sexual act which she had looked forward to could not be accomplished, for at the first contact there was great pain and spasmodic resistance of the vagina. There was a condition of vaginismus. After repeated attempts on subsequent occasions her lover desisted. Her desire for intercourse increased, however, rather than diminished, and at last she was able to tolerate coitus, but the pain was so great that she acquired a horror of the sexual embrace and no longer sought it. Having much will power, she restrained all erotic impulses during many years. It was not until the period of the menopause that the long repressed desires broke out, and at last found a symbolical outlet that was no longer normal, but was felt to supply a complete gratification. She sought the close physical contact of the young children in her care. She would lie on her bed naked, with two or three naked children, make them suck her breasts and press them to every part of her body. Her conduct was discovered by means of other children who peeped through the keyhole, and she was placed under Penta for treatment. In this case the loss of moral and mental inhibition, due probably to troubles of the climacteric, led to indulgence, under abnormal conditions, in those primitive contacts which are normally the beginning of love, and these, supported by the ideal image of the early lover, constituted a complete and adequate symbol of natural love in a morbidly perverted individual.

FOOTNOTES:

The term "erotic symbolism" has already been employed by Eulenburg . It must be borne in mind that this term, implying the specific emotion, is much narrower than the term "sexual symbolism," which may be used to designate a great variety of ritual and social practices which have played a part in the evolution of civilization.

A number of synonyms for the female pudenda are brought together by Schurig--cunnus, hortus, concha, navis, fovea, larva, canis, annulus, focus, cymba, antrum, delta, myrtus, etc.--and he discusses many of them.

Chevalier , followed by E. Laurent , separates this group from other fetichistic perversions, under the head of "azo?philie." I see no adequate ground for this step. The various forms of fetichism are too intimately associated to permit of any group of them being violently separated from the others.

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.

Of all forms of erotic symbolism the most frequent is that which idealizes the foot and the shoe. The phenomena we here encounter are sometimes so complex and raise so many interesting questions that it is necessary to discuss them somewhat fully.

At the same time it is scarcely usual for the normal lover, in most civilized countries to-day, to attach primary importance to the foot, such as he very frequently attaches to the eyes, though the feet play a very conspicuous part in the work of certain novelists.

In a small but not inconsiderable minority of persons, however, the foot or the boot becomes the most attractive part of a woman, and in some morbid cases the woman herself is regarded as a comparatively unimportant appendage to her feet or her boots. The boots under civilized conditions much more frequently constitute the sexual symbol than do the feet themselves; this is not surprising since in ordinary life the feet are not often seen.

It is usually only under exceptionally favoring conditions that foot-fetichism occurs, as in the case recorded by Marandon de Montyel of a doctor who had been brought up in the West Indies. His mother had been insane and he himself was subject to obsessions, especially of being incapable of urinating; he had had nocturnal incontinence of urine in childhood. All the women of the people in the West Indies go about with naked feet, which are often beautiful. His puberty evolved under this influence, and foot-fetichism developed. He especially admired large, fat, arched feet, with delicate skin and large, regular toes. He masturbated with images of feet. At 15 he had relations with a colored chambermaid, but feared to mention his fetichism, though it was the touch of her feet that chiefly excited him. He now gave up masturbation, and had a succession of mistresses, but was always ashamed to confess his fancies until, at the age of 33, in Paris, a very intelligent woman who had become his mistress discovered his mania and skillfully enabled him to yield to it without shock to his modesty. He was devoted to this mistress, who had very beautiful feet , until she finally left him.

We may clearly see how this combination of sensitive and precocious sexual ardor with extreme shyness, furnished the soil on which the germ of shoe-fetichism was able to gain a firm root and persist in some degree throughout a long life very largely given up to a pursuit of women, abnormal rather by its excessiveness than its perversity. A few years later, he tells us, he happened to see a pretty pair of shoes in a bootmaker's shop, and on hearing that they belonged to a girl whom at that time he reverently adored at a distance he blushed and nearly fainted.

In 1749 he was for a time attracted to a young woman very much older than himself; he secretly carried away one of her slippers and kept it for a day; a little later he again took away a shoe of the same woman which had fascinated him when on her foot, and, he seems to imply, he used it to masturbate with.

At this period Restif's foot-fetichism reached its highest point of development. It was the aberration of a highly sensitive and very precocious boy. While the preoccupation with feet and shoes persisted throughout life, it never became a complete perversion and never replaced the normal end of sexual desire. His love for Madam Parangon, one of the deepest emotions in his whole life, was also the climax of his shoe-fetichism. She represented his ideal woman, an ethereal sylph with wasp-waist and a child's feet; it was always his highest praise for a woman that she resembled Madame Parangon, and he desired that her slipper should be buried with him.

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