Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 | Page 7

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 (O blessed Relique) 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.[9]
Burton's accuracy in describing the ways of lovers in his century is

shown by a passage in Hamilton's Mémoires de Gramont. Miss Price,
one of the beauties of Charles II's court, and Dongan were tenderly
attached to each other; when the latter died he left behind a casket full
of all possible sorts of love-tokens pertaining to his mistress, including,
among other things, "all kinds of hair." And as regards France, Burton's
contemporary, Howell, wrote in 1627 in his Familiar Letters
concerning the repulse of the English at Rhé: "A captain told me that
when they were rifling the dead bodies of the French gentlemen after
the first invasion they found that many of them had their mistresses'
favors tied about their genitories."
Schurig (Spermatologia, p. 357) at the beginning of the eighteenth
century knew a Belgian lady who, when her dearly loved husband died,
secretly cut off his penis and treasured it as a sacred relic in a silver
casket. She eventually powdered it, he adds, and found it an efficacious
medicine for herself and others. An earlier example, of a lady at the
French court who embalmed and perfumed the genital organs of her
dead husband, always preserving them in a gold casket, is mentioned
by Brantôme. Mantegazza knew a man who kept for many years on his
desk the skull of his dead mistress, making it his dearest companion.
"Some," he remarks, "have slept for months and years with a book, a
garment, a trifle. I once had a friend who would spend long hours of
joy and emotion kissing a thread of silk which she had held between
her fingers, now the only relic of love." (Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell'
Amore, cap. X.) In the same way I knew a lady who in old age still
treasured in her desk, as the one relic of the only man she had ever been
attracted to, a fragment of paper he had casually twisted up in a
conversation with her half a century before.
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.[10]
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.
I. PARTS OF THE BODY.--A. Normal: Hand, foot, breasts, nates, hair,
secretions and excretions, etc.
B. Abnormal: Lameness, squinting, pitting of smallpox, etc. Paidophilia
or the love of children, presbyophilia or the love of the aged, and
necrophilia or the attraction for corpses, may be included under this
head, as well as the excitement caused by various animals.
II. INANIMATE OBJECTS.[11]--A. Garments: Gloves, shoes and
stockings and garters, caps, aprons, handkerchiefs, underlinen.
B. Impersonal Objects: Here may be included all the various objects
that may accidentally acquire the power of exciting sexual feeling in
auto-erotism. Pygmalionism may also be included.
III. ACTS AND ATTITUDES.--A. Active: Whipping, cruelty,
exhibitionism. B. Passive: Being whipped, experiencing cruelty.
Personal odors and the sound of the voice may be included under this
head. C. Mixoscopic: The vision of climbing, swinging, etc. The acts of
urination and defecation. The coitus of animals.
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