place in the mind.  In girls, on the other hand, it often tends to persist.  Edmond de Goncourt, a minute observer of the feminine mind, refers in Cherie to “those innocent and triumphant gaieties which scatalogic stories have the privilege of arousing in women who have remained still children, even the most distinguished women.”  The extent to which innocent young women, who would frequently be uninterested or repelled in presence of the sexually obscene are sometimes attracted by the scatalogically obscene, becomes intelligible, however, if we realize that a symbolism comes here into play.  In women the more specifically sexual knowledge and experience of life frequently develop much later than in men or even remains in abeyance, and the specifically sexual phenomena cannot therefore easily lend themselves to wit, or humor, or imagination.  But the scatalogic sphere, by the very fact that in women it is a specially intimate and secret region which is yet always liable to be unexpectedly protruded into consciousness, furnishes an inexhaustible field for situations which have the same character as those furnished by the sexually obscene.  It thus happens that the sexually obscene which in men tends to overshadow the scatalogically obscene, in women—­partly from inexperience and partly, it is probable, from their almost physiological modesty—­plays a part subordinate to the scatalogical.  In a somewhat analogous way scatalogical wit and humor play a considerable part in the work of various eminent authors who were clergymen or priests.

In addition to the anatomical and psychological associations which contribute to furnish a basis on which erotic symbolisms may spring up, there are also physiological connections between the genital and urinary spheres which directly favor such symbolisms.  In discussing the analysis of the sexual impulse in a previous volume of these Studies, I have pointed out the remarkable relationship—­sometimes of transference, sometimes of compensation—­which exists between genital tension and vesical tension, both in men and women.  In the histories of normal sexual development brought together at the end of that and subsequent volumes the relationship may frequently be traced, as also in the case of C.P. in the present study (p. 37).  Vesical power is also commonly believed to be in relation with sexual potency, and the inability to project the urinary stream in a normal manner is one of the accepted signs of sexual impotency.[26] Fere, again, has recorded the history of a man with periodic crises of sexual desire, and subsequently sexual obsession without desire, which were always accompanied by the impulse to urinate and by increased urination.[27] In the case, recorded by Pitres and Regis, of a young girl who, having once at the sight of a young man she liked in a theater been overcome by sexual feeling accompanied by a strong desire to urinate, was afterward tormented by a groundless fear of experiencing an irresistible desire to urinate at inconvenient times,[28] we have an example of what may be called a physiological scatalogic symbolism of sex, an emotion which was primarily erotic becoming transferred to the bladder and then remaining persistent.  From such a physiological symbolism it is but a step to the psychological symbolisms of scatalogic fetichism.