Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5: Erotic Symbolism; The Mechanism of Detumescence; The Psychic State in PregnancyEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5: Erotic Symbolism; The Mechanism of Detumescence; The Psychic State in Pregnancy
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
"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." (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.
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