to cover manifestations so numerous and so varied. The term "sexual
equivalents" will seem preferable to some. While, however, it may be fully
admitted that these perversions are "sexual equivalents"--or at all events
equivalents of the normal sexual impulse--that term is merely a
descriptive label which tells us nothing of the phenomena. "Sexual
Symbolism" gives us the key to the process, the key that makes all these
perversions intelligible. In all of them--very clearly in some, as in
shoe-fetichism; more obscurely in others, as in exhibitionism--it has come
about by causes congenital, acquired, or both, that some object or class
of objects, some act or group of acts, has acquired a dynamic power over
the psycho-physical mechanism of the sexual process, deflecting it from
its normal adjustment to the whole of a beloved person of the opposite
sex. There has been a transmutation of values, and certain objects,
certain acts, have acquired an emotional value which for the normal person
they do not possess. Such objects and acts are properly, it seems to me,
termed symbols, and that term embodies the only justification that in most
cases these manifestations can legitimately claim.

"The Mechanism of Detumescence" brings us at last to the final climax for
which the earlier and more prolonged stage of tumescence, which has
occupied us so often in these _Studies_, is the elaborate preliminary.
"The art of love," a clever woman novelist has written, "is the art of
preparation." That "preparation" is, on the physiological side, the
production of tumescence, and all courtship is concerned in building up
tumescence. But the final conjugation of two individuals in an explosion
of detumescence, thus slowly brought about, though it is largely an
involuntary act, is still not without its psychological implications and
consequences; and it is therefore a matter for regret that so little is
yet known about it. The one physiological act in which two individuals are
lifted out of all ends that center in self and become the instrument of