Studies in the psychology of sex. [Vol.5], Erotic symbolism : The mechanism of detumescence / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
©1906, 1920
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Credit: Studies in the psychology of sex. [Vol.5], Erotic symbolism : The mechanism of detumescence / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    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 conscious- ness, 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 nor- mal 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 La-bas, it is compelled to repro- duce 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