... 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.
"When our human imagination seeks to animate artificial things," Huysmans
writes in _La-bas_, "it is compelled to reproduce 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.
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