Love and Pain," it will now be understood that we
were standing throughout on the threshold of erotic symbolism. Pain
itself, in the sense in which we slowly learned to define it in this
relationship--as a state of intense emotional excitement--may, under a
great variety of special circumstances, become an erotic symbol and afford
the same relief as the emotions normally accompanying the sexual act.
Active algolagnia or sadism is thus a form of erotic symbolism; passive
algolagnia or masochism is (in a man) an inverted form of erotic
symbolism. Active flagellation or passive flagellation are, in exactly the
same way, manifestations of erotic symbolism, the imaginative mimicry of
coitus.

Binet and also Krafft-Ebing[64] have argued in effect that the whole of
sexual selection is a matter of fetichism, that is to say, of erotic
symbolism of object. "Normal love," Binet states, "appears as the result
of a complicated fetichism." Tarde also seems to have regarded love as
normally a kind of fetichism. "We are a long time before we fall in love
with a woman," he remarks; "we must wait to see the detail which strikes
and delights us, and causes us to overlook what displeases us. Only in
normal love the details are many and always changing. Constancy in love is
rarely anything else but a voyage around the beloved person, a voyage of
exploration and ever new discoveries. The most faithful lover does not
love the same woman in the same way for two days in succession."[65]

From that point of view normal sexual love is the sway of a fetich--more
or less arbitrary, more or less (as Binet terms it) polytheistic--and it
can have little objective basis. But, as we saw when considering "Sexual
Selection in Man" in the previous volume, more especially when analyzing
the notion of beauty, we are justified in believing that beauty has to a
large extent an objective basis, and that love by no means depends simply
on the capricious selection of some individual fetich. The individual
factor, as we saw, is but one of many factors which constitute beauty. In
the study of sexual selection that individual factor was passed over very
lightly. We now see that it is often a factor of great importance, for in
it are rooted all these outgrowths--normal in their germs, highly abnormal
in their more extreme developments--which make up erotic symbolism.

Erotic symbolism is therefore concerned with all that is least generic,
least specific, all that is