If, as Groos asserts,[3] a
symbol has two chief meanings, one in which it indicates a physical
process which stands for a psychic process, and another in which it
indicates a part which represents the whole, erotic symbolism of act
corresponds to the first of these chief meanings, and erotic symbolism of
object to the other.
Although it is not impossible to find some germs of erotic symbolism in
animals, in its more pronounced manifestations it is only found in the
human species. It could not be otherwise, for such symbolism involves not
only the play of fancy and imagination, the idealizing aptitude, but also
a certain amount of power of concentrating the attention on a point
outside the natural path of instinct and the ability to form new mental
constructions around that point. There are, indeed, as we shall see,
elementary forms of erotic symbolism which are not uncommonly associated
with feeble-mindedness, but even these are still peculiarly human, and in
its less crude manifestations erotic symbolism easily lends itself to
every degree of human refinement and intelligence.
"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.
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