V
I also wish to mention that sexual aberration, in which an object unfit for the sexual aim is substituted for the normal one, and is known as fetichism. We need not go into the causes of it, but psychoanalysis has shown that smell plays a part. We often find poets celebrating the eyebrows, the gloves, and other objects connected with the women they love. Though a certain amount of fetichism is normal in love, literature gives us instances where it amounts to an aberrated passion in the author. There is much fetichism in Gautier's stories, where he dwells on the fetichistic characteristics of his heroes in whom he describes himself. Then those poems where the sparrows and dogs of the beloved are described as if the author were in love with them because of their associations, those tales where too much attention is given to the dress of the heroines, all have fetichistic traces.
A phase of sex life in the child that is significant for the future is the sublimation that occurs in the sexual latency period between the third and fifth year, when the sentiments of shame, loathing and morality appear. These are reaction formations to the perverse tendencies of infancy. They are brought about at the cost of the infantile sexuality itself. These sublimations take place in the beginning in this latency period, and if they do not occur there is an abnormal development and the result is the latter perversions of life. When we say a man has no moral sense, we mean not only that he does not know the difference between right and wrong but that he is not disgusted or shamed at sexual conduct that is held in abhorrence by most people. Hence those authors who have this indifference to perverse moral conduct in their work, never as children in the latency period developed shame or disgust. All this is again evidence of the influence of the sublimations in childhood upon later literary work and view points. Girls as a rule develop this sense of morality earlier than boys, and this no doubt accounts to some extent for the prudishness of most women writers. The development is greater and we therefore find no women Rabelais in literature.
It is no exaggeration then to say that the infantile sex life governs the psychology of the future writer and the nature and tendency of his work.