The widespread symbolism of sex arose in the theories and conceptions of primitive peoples concerning the function of generation and its nearest analogies in Nature; it was continued for the sake of the vigorous and expressive terminology which it furnished both for daily life and for literature; its final survivals were cultivated because they furnished a delicately aesthetic method of approaching matters which a growing refinement of sentiment made it difficult for lovers and poets to approach in a more crude and direct manner.  Its existence is of interest to us now because it shows the objective validity of the basis on which erotic symbolism, as we have here to understand it, develops.  But from first to last it is a distinct phenomenon, having a more or less reasoned and intellectual basis, and it scarcely serves in any degree to feed the sexual impulse.  Erotic symbolism is not intellectual but emotional in its origin; it starts into being, obscurely, with but a dim consciousness or for the most part none at all, either suddenly from the shock of some usually youthful experience, or more gradually through an instinctive brooding on those things which are most intimately associated with a sexually desirable person.

The kind of soil on which the germs of erotic symbolism may develop is well seen in cases of sexual hyperaesthesia.  In such cases all the emotionally sexual analogies and resemblances, which in erotic symbolism are fixed and organized, may be traced in vague and passing forms, a single hyperaesthetic individual perhaps presenting a great variety of germinal symbolisms.

Thus it has been recorded of an Italian nun (whose sister became a prostitute) that from the age of 8 she had desire for coitus, from the age of 10 masturbated, and later had homosexual feelings, that the same feelings and practices continued after she had taken the veil, though from time to time they assumed religious equivalents.  The mere contact, indeed, of a priest’s hand, the news of the presentation of an ecclesiastic she had known to a bishopric, the sight of an ape, the contemplation of the crucified Christ, the figure of a toy, the picture of a demon, the act of defecation in the children entrusted to her care (whom, on this account, and against the regulations, she would accompany to the closets), especially the sight and the mere recollection of flies in sexual connection—­all these things sufficed to produce in her a powerful orgasm. (Archivio di Psichiatria, 1902, fasc.  II-III, p. 338.)

A boy of 15 (given to masturbation), studied by Macdonald in America, was similarly hyperaesthetic to the symbols of sexual emotion.  “I like amusing myself with my comrades,” he told Macdonald, “rolling ourselves into a ball, which gives one a funny kind of warmth.  I have a special pleasure in talking about some things.  It is the same when the governess kisses me on saying good night or when I lean against