Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 | Page 8

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.[12] It is exactly analogous to the
child's love of a doll, which is also a form of sexual (though not erotic)
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 (Anis El-Ochchâq in Bibliothèque des Hautes
Etudes, fasc, 25, 1875); the Arabs, as Lane remarks (Arabian Society in
the Middle Ages, p. 214), are equally extravagant in their admiration of
a mole.
Stendhal long since well described the process by which a defect
becomes a sexual symbol. "Even little defects in a woman's face," he
remarked, "such as a smallpox pit, may arouse the tenderness of a man
who loves her, and throw him into deep reverie when he sees them in
another woman. It is because he has experienced a thousand feelings in
the presence of that smallpox mark, that these feelings have been for
the most part delicious, all of the highest interest, and that, whatever
they may have been, they are renewed with incredible vivacity on the
sight of this sign, even when perceived on the face of another woman.
If in such a case we come to prefer and love ugliness, it is only because
in such a case ugliness is beauty. A man loved a woman who was very
thin and marked by smallpox; he lost her by death. Three years later, in

Rome, he became acquainted with two women, one very beautiful, the
other thin and marked by smallpox, on that account, if you will, rather
ugly. I saw him in love with this plain one at the end of a week, which
he had employed in effacing her plainness by his memories." (De
l'Amour, Chapter XVII.)
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.