Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 | Page 4

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