The Forms of Erotic Symbolism are Simulacra of Coitus

Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 by Havelock Ellis is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. Erotic Symbolism - VI

Erotic Symbolism - 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 to be Found in the Emotional Sphere—The Passage 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 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 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."

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. 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.

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."

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."

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. 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.

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.

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