en though the
person with whom it is associated is altogether unattractive. In the final
stage the person and even all association with a person disappear
altogether from the field of sexual consciousness; the abstract symbol
rules supreme.

Long, however, before the symbol has reached that final climax of morbid
intensity we may be said to have passed beyond the sphere of sexual love.
A person, not an abstracted quality, must be the goal of love. So long as
the fetich is subordinated to the person it serves to heighten love. But
love must be based on a complexus of attractive qualities, or it has no
stability.[70] As soon as the fetich becomes isolated and omnipotent, so
that the person sinks into the background as an unimportant appendage of
the fetich, all stability is lost. The fetichist now follows an impersonal
and abstract symbol withersoever it may lead him.

It has been seen that there are an extraordinary number of forms in which
erotic symbolism may be felt. It must be remembered, and it cannot be too
distinctly emphasized, that the links that bind together the forms of
erotic symbolism are not to be found in objects or even in acts, but in
the underlying emotion. A feeling is the first condition of the symbol, a
feeling which recalls, by a subtle and unconscious automatic association
of resemblance or of contiguity, some former feeling. It is the similarity
of emotion, instinctively apprehended, which links on a symbol only
partially sexual, or even apparently not sexual at all, to the great
central focus of sexual emotion, the great dominating force which brings
the symbol its life-blood.[71]

The cases of sexual hyperaesthesia, quoted at the beginning of this study,
do but present in a morbidly comprehensive and sensitive form those
possibilities of erotic symbolism which, in some degree, or at some
period, are latent in most persons. They are genuinely instinctive and
automatic, and have nothing in common with that fanciful and deliberate
play of the intelligence around sexual imagery--not infrequently seen in
abnormal and insane persons--which has no significance for sexual
psychology.

It is to the extreme individualization involved by the developments of
erotic symbolism that the fetichist owes his morbid and perilous
isolation. The lover who is influenced by all the elements of sexual
selection is always supported by the fellow-feeling of a larger body of
other human beings; he has behind him his