§ 119
The fetishism of the single sense quality is an important consideration here. Harvey O’Higgins in The Secret Springs shows how even a part of the person or a phase of the woman’s personality may take on an overplus of emotional tension in the mind of the man, such as to make him think he has found the paragon of all the virtues in the first woman he sees having this peculiarity.
If his mother’s hands were especially beautiful, it is likely that beauty of hands will play a big part in his unconscious selection of a life partner, and that homely hands will repel him in a girl otherwise eminently fitted to be his mate.
The deep emotions experienced by a little boy in seeing his mother in evening dress in the ruddy glow of a red lampshade in the drawing-room gave him a depth of response to that one vision that made him twenty years later fall suddenly in love with a girl whom he saw illuminated by the red hall light in her father’s house.
One is partly, but only partly, conscious of one’s fetishes. No man except the most self-conscious student of his own mental reactions can tell exactly why he likes or dislikes anything. He can give many reasons; but the real cause lies in the unconscious memory he has forgotten—a memory of some pleasurable emotion of exceeding depth that has occurred possibly a quarter of a century before.
But whatever may be the real cause of the disproportionate emphasis on certain features, mannerisms, or mental or physical habits of his wife, the fact remains. It may well be questioned that any such overemphasis on the way she speaks or smiles, or on some peculiar catch in the breath, should make him lose control of himself, but it does. It is not necessarily that he is set to go off in ecstasies at the occurrence of any of these factors, as much as that through his own experience he sets himself thus in a sort of lock combination.