Emotional and visual impressions are brought into associative connection, and this association is strengthened in proportion as the recurring emotion awakens the visual memory-picture, or the latter (another meeting) renews sexual excitement, which may possibly reach the intensity of orgasm and pollution (dream-picture). In this case the whole physical personality has the effect of a fetich.
As Binet and others show, merely parts of the whole, simply peculiarities, either physical or mental, may affect the person of the opposite sex as a fetich, when the perception of them is associated with (accidental) sexual excitement (or induces it).
It is well known from experience that accident determines this mental association, that the objects of the fetich may be individually very diverse, and that thus the most peculiar sympathies (and antipathies) arise.
These physiological facts of fetichism explain the individual sympathies between husband and wife; the preference of a certain person to all others of the same sex. Since the fetich represents a symbol that is purely individual, it is clear that its effect must be individual. Since it is colored by the most intense pleasurable feeling, it follows that possible faults in the beloved object are overlooked (“Love is blind”), and an exaltation of it is induced that to others is incomprehensible, and even silly under some circumstances. Thus it is clear why lovers are not understood by their unaffected fellow-men; and why they deify their idols, develop a true cult of devotion, and invests them with attributes which objectively they do not possess. Thus we may understand why love appears sometimes more like a passion, sometimes as a formal, exceptional mental state, in which the unattainable seems attainable, the ugly beautiful, the profane sacred, and every other interest, every duty, disappears.
Tarde (Archives de l’anthropologie criminelle, v year, No. 30) rightfully emphasizes the fact that the fetich may vary with nations as well as with individuals, but that the general ideal of beauty remains the same among civilized people of the same era.
Binet deserves great credit for having studied and analyzed in detail the fetichism of love. The particular sympathies all spring from it. Thus one is attracted to slender, another to plump beauties, to blondes or brunettes. For one a peculiar expression of the eyes; for another a peculiar tone of the voice, or a particular (even an artificial) odor (perfume); or the hand, the foot, the ear, etc., may be the individual fetich (charm),—the beginning of a complicated chain of mental processes which, as a whole, represent love, i.e., the longing to possess, physically and mentally, the beloved object.
This fact is important, as showing a condition for the origin of a fetichism that falls within physiological limits. The fetich may constantly retain its significance without being pathological; but this is possible only when the particular concept is developed to a general concept; when the resulting love comes to take as its object the whole mental and physical personality.
Normal love can be nothing but a synthesis, a generalization. Ludwig Brunn,[[19]] under the heading, “The Fetichism of Love,” cleverly says:—
“Thus normal love appears to us as a symphony of tones of all kinds. It results from the most various stimuli. It is likewise polytheistic. Fetichism recognizes only the tone of a single instrument; it results from a certain stimulus; it is monotheistic.”
On slight reflection any one will see that real love (this word is only too often abused) can be spoken of only when the whole person is both physically and mentally the object of adoration. Love must always have a sensual element, i.e., the desire to possess the beloved object, to be united with it and fulfill the laws of nature. But when merely the body of the person of the opposite sex is the object of love, when satisfaction of sensual pleasure is the sole object, without desire to possess the soul and enjoy mutual communion, love is not genuine, no more than that of platonic lovers, who love only the soul and avoid sensual pleasure (many cases of contrary sexuality). For the former merely the body, for the latter simply the soul, is a fetich, and the love fetichism. Such cases certainly represent transitions to pathological fetichism. This assumption is even more justified when, as a further criterion of real love, mental[[20]] satisfaction must be given by the sexual act.