Bechterew, in St. Petersburg, has recorded the case of a man who when a child used to fall asleep at the knees of his nurse with his head buried in the folds of her apron; in this position he first experienced erection and voluptuous sensations; when a youth he had no attraction to naked women, and in real life and in dreams was only excited sexually under conditions recalling his early experience; in his relations with women he preferred them dressed, and was excited by the rustling sound of their skirts; in this case there was no traceable neuropathic taint nor any other personal peculiarity. (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.  All degrees of such symbolism are possible.  While the average insensitive person may fail to perceive them at all, for the more alert and imaginative lover they are a fascinating part of the highly charged crystallization of passion.  A more nervously exceptional person, when once such a symbolism has become firmly implanted, may find it an absolutely essential element in the charm of a beloved and charming person.  Finally, for the individual who is thoroughly unsound the symbol becomes generalized; a person is no longer desired at all, being merely regarded as an appendage of the symbol, or being dispensed with altogether; the symbol is alone desired, and is fully adequate to impart by itself complete sexual gratification.  While it must be considered a morbid state to demand a symbol as an almost essential part of the charm of a desired person, it is only in the final condition, in which the symbol becomes all-sufficing, that we have a true and complete perversion.  In the less complete forms of symbolism it is still the woman who is desired, and the ends of procreation may be served; when the woman is ignored and the mere symbol is an adequate and even preferred stimulus to detumescence the pathological condition becomes complete.