(Summarized in _Journal de
Psychologie Normale et Pathologique_, January-February, 1904, p.
72.)
In a curious case recorded in detail by Moll, a philologist of
sensitive temperament but sound heredity, who had always been
fond of flowers, at the age of 21 became engaged to a young lady
who wore large roses fastened in her jacket; from this time roses
became to him a sexual fetich, to kiss them caused erection, and
his erotic dreams were accompanied by visions of roses and the
hallucination of their odor; the engagement was finally broken
off and the rose-fetichism disappeared (_Untersuchungen ueber
Libido Sexualis_, bd. i, p. 540).
Such associations may naturally occur in the early experiences of even the
most normal persons. The degree to which they will influence the
subsequent life and thought and feeling depends on the degree of the
individual's morbid emotional receptivity, on the extent to which he is
hereditarily susceptible of abnormal deviation. Precocity is undoubtedly a
condition which favors such deviation; a child who is precociously and
abnormally sensitive to persons of the opposite sex before puberty has
established the normal channels of sexual desire, is peculiarly liable to
become the prey of a chance symbolism.
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