the desired fetich.  In an agony of shame he begged the mercy of silence concerning this episode, at the same time revealing his life-history.  He has constantly been haunted by the dread of detection, as well as by remorse and the consciousness of degradation, also by the fear that his unconquerable obsession may lead him to the asylum.

The scatalogic groups of sexual perversions, urolagnia and coprolagnia, as may be sufficiently seen in this brief summary, are not merely olfactory fetiches.  They are, in a larger proportion of cases, dynamic symbols, a preoccupation with physiological acts which, by associations of contiguity and still more of resemblance, have gained the virtue of stimulating in slight cases, and replacing in more extreme cases, the normal preoccupation with the central physiological act itself.  We have seen that there are various considerations which amply suffice to furnish a basis for such associations.  And when we reflect that in the popular mind, and to some extent in actual fact, the sexual act itself is, like urination and defecation, an excretory act, we can understand that the true excretory acts may easily become symbols of the pseudo-excretory act.  It is, indeed, in the muscular release of accumulated pressures and tensions, involved by the act of liberating the stored-up excretion, that we have the closest simulacrum of the tumescence and detumescence of the sexual process.[32]

In this way the erotic symbolism of urolagnia and coprolagnia is completely analogous with that dynamic symbolism of the clinging and swinging garments which Herrick has so accurately described, with the complex symbolism of flagellation and its play of the rod against the blushing and trembling nates, with the symbols of sexual strain and stress which are embodied in the foot and the act of treading.

FOOTNOTES: 

[24] Fuchs (Das Erotische Element In der Karikatur, p. 26), distinguishing sharply between the “erotic” and the “obscene,” reserves the latter term exclusively for the representation of excretory organs and acts.  He considers that this is etymologically the most exact usage.  However that may be, it seems to me that, in any case, “obscene” has become so vague a term that it is now impracticable to give it a restricted and precise sense.

[25] In this connection we may profitably contemplate the hand and recall the vast gamut of functions, sacred and profane, which that organ exercises.  Many savages strictly reserve the left hand to the lowlier purposes of life; but in civilization that is not considered necessary, and it may be wholesome for some of us to meditate on the more humble uses of the same hand which is raised in the supreme gesture of benediction and which men have often counted it a privilege to kiss.

[26] See, e.g., Morselli, Una Causa di Nullita del Matrimonio, 1902, p. 39.