f which it is not difficult to see how, in some
strange and eccentric form--on a basis of association through resemblance
or contiguity or both combined--there arises a definite mimicry of the
normal sexual act together with the normal emotions which accompany that
act. It has become clear in what sense we are justified in recognizing
erotic symbolism.

The symbolic and, as it were, abstracted nature of these
manifestations is shown by the remarkable way in which they are
sometimes capable of transference from the object to the subject.
That is to say that the fetichist may show a tendency to
cultivate his fetich in his own person. A foot-fetichist may like
to go barefoot himself; a man who admired lame women liked to
halt himself; a man who was attracted by small waists in women
found sexual gratification in tight-lacing himself; a man who was
fascinated by fine white skin and wished to cut it found
satisfaction in cutting his own skin; Moll's coprolagnic
fetichist found a voluptuous pleasure in his own acts of
defecation. (See, e.g., Krafft-Ebing, _Op. cit._, p. 221, 224,
226; Hammond, _Sexual Impotence_, p. 74; cf. _ante_, p. 68.) Such
symbolic transference seems to have a profoundly natural basis,
for we may see a somewhat similar phenomenon in the well-known
tendency of cows to mount a cow in heat. This would appear to be,
not so much a homosexual impulse, as the dynamic psychic action
of an olfactory sexual symbol in a transformed form.

We seem to have here a psychic process which is a curious
reversal of that process of _Einfuehlung_--the projection of one's
own activities into the object contemplated--which Lipps has so
fruitfully developed as the essence of every aesthetic condition.
(T. Lipps, _AEsthetik_, Teil I, 1903.) By _Einfuehlung_ our own
interior activity becomes the activity of the object perceived,
a thing being beautiful in proportion as it lends itself to our
_Einfuehlung_. But by this action of erotic symbolism, on the
other hand, we transfer the activity of the object into
ourselves.

When the idea of erotic symbolism as manifested in such definite and
typical forms becomes realized, it further becomes clear that the vaguer
manifestations of such symbolism are exceedingly widespread. When in a
previous volume we were discussing and drawing together the various
threads which unite "