In this volume the terminal phenomena of the sexual process are discussed,
before an attempt is finally made, in the concluding volume, to consider
the bearings of the psychology of sex on that part of morals which may be
called "social hygiene."
Under "Erotic Symbolism" I include practically all the aberrations of the
sexual instinct, although some of these have seemed of sufficient
importance for separate discussion in previous volumes. It is highly
probable that many readers will consider that the name scarcely suffices
to cover manifestations so numerous and so varied. The term "sexual
equivalents" will seem preferable to some. While, however, it may be fully
admitted that these perversions are "sexual equivalents"--or at all events
equivalents of the normal sexual impulse--that term is merely a
descriptive label which tells us nothing of the phenomena. "Sexual
Symbolism" gives us the key to the process, the key that makes all these
perversions intelligible. In all of them--very clearly in some, as in
shoe-fetichism; more obscurely in others, as in exhibitionism--it has come
about by causes congenital, acquired, or both, that some object or class
of objects, some act or group of acts, has acquired a dynamic power over
the psycho-physical mechanism of the sexual process, deflecting it from
its normal adjustment to the whole of a beloved person of the opposite
sex. There has been a transmutation of values, and certain objects,
certain acts, have acquired an emotional value which for the normal person
they do not possess. Such objects and acts are properly, it seems to me,
termed symbols, and that term embodies the only justification that in most
cases these manifestations can legitimately claim.
"The Mechanism of Detumescence" brings us at last to the final climax for
which the earlier and more prolonged stage of tumescence, which has
occupied us so often in these _Studies_, is the elaborate preliminary.
"The art of love," a clever woman novelist has written, "is the art of
preparation." That "preparation" is, on the physiological side, the
production of tumescence, and all courtship is concerned in building up
tumescence. But the final conjugation of two individuals in an explosion
of detumescence, thus slowly brought about, though it is largely an
involuntary act, is still not without its psychological implications and
consequences; and it is therefore a matter for regret that so little is
yet known about it. The one physiological act in which two individuals are
lifted out of all ends that center in self and become the instrument of
those higher forces which fashion the species, can never be an act to be
slurred over as trivial or unworthy of study.
In the brief study of "The Psychic State in Pregnancy" we at last touch
the point at which the whole complex process of sex reaches its goal. A
woman with a child in her womb is the everlasting miracle which all the
romance of love, all the cunning devices of tumescence and detumescence,
have been invented to make manifest. The psychic state of the woman who
thus occupies the supreme position which life has to offer cannot fail to
be of exceeding interest from many points of view, and not least because
the maternal instinct is one of the elements even of love between the
sexes. But the psychology of pregnancy is full of involved problems, and
here again, as so often in the wide field we have traversed, we stand at
the threshold of a door it is not yet given us to pass.