A very complete kind of erotic symbolism is furnished by Pygmalionism or the love of statues.[12] It is exactly analogous to the child’s love of a doll, which is also a form of sexual (though not erotic) symbolism.  In a somewhat less abnormal form, erotic symbolism probably shows itself in its simplest shape in the tendency to idealize unbeautiful peculiarities in a beloved person, so that such peculiarities are ever afterward almost or quite essential in order to arouse sexual attraction.  In this way men have become attracted to limping women.  Even the most normal man may idealize a trifling defect in a beloved woman.  The attention is inevitably concentrated on any such slight deviation from regular beauty, and the natural result of such concentration is that a complexus of associated thoughts and emotions becomes attached to something that in itself is unbeautiful.  A defect becomes an admired focus of attention, the embodied symbol of the lover’s emotion.

Thus a mole is not in itself beautiful, but by the tendency to erotic symbolism it becomes so.  Persian poets especially have lavished the richest imagery on moles (Anis El-Ochchaq in Bibliotheque des Hautes Etudes, fasc, 25, 1875); the Arabs, as Lane remarks (Arabian Society in the Middle Ages, p. 214), are equally extravagant in their admiration of a mole.

Stendhal long since well described the process by which a defect becomes a sexual symbol.  “Even little defects in a woman’s face,” he remarked, “such as a smallpox pit, may arouse the tenderness of a man who loves her, and throw him into deep reverie when he sees them in another woman.  It is because he has experienced a thousand feelings in the presence of that smallpox mark, that these feelings have been for the most part delicious, all of the highest interest, and that, whatever they may have been, they are renewed with incredible vivacity on the sight of this sign, even when perceived on the face of another woman.  If in such a case we come to prefer and love ugliness, it is only because in such a case ugliness is beauty.  A man loved a woman who was very thin and marked by smallpox; he lost her by death.  Three years later, in Rome, he became acquainted with two women, one very beautiful, the other thin and marked by smallpox, on that account, if you will, rather ugly.  I saw him in love with this plain one at the end of a week, which he had employed in effacing her plainness by his memories.” (De l’Amour, Chapter XVII.)

In the tendency to idealize the unbeautiful features of a beloved person erotic symbolism shows itself in a simple and normal form.  In a less simple and more morbid form it appears in persons in whom the normal paths of sexual gratification are for some reasons inhibited, and who are thus led to find the symbols of natural love in unnatural perversions.  It is for this reason that so many erotic symbolisms take root in childhood and puberty, before the sexual instincts have reached full development.  It is for the same reason also, that, at the other end of life, when the sexual energies are failing, erotic symbols sometimes tend to be substituted for the normal pleasures of sex.  It is for this reason, again, that both men and women whose normal energies are inhibited sometimes find the symbols of sexual gratification in the caresses of children.