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.
§ 120
In reality this setting is something that should take place during and not before marriage, if it must take place at all in a man. It were much better if it took place not at all in the husband but in the wife.
This overvaluation of a smile, a dimple, a look, a timbre of the voice, a perfume or froufrou, is used by men even before marriage as a sexual stimulus when in reality none is needed.
The question of most vital importance is not so much, however, the shape of eyebrow, the laughter rhythm, or other mannerism or characteristic of a woman that causes a man to decide that he wants to marry her, for that is in most cases in the unconscious, and therefore actually inaccessible to him except through much more study than he is able or willing to give it. The fetishes made by the unconscious, kept in the unconscious, and causing selection on the man’s part are as nothing in importance to the fetishes that he had innately or has acquired that give overvaluation for him to certain phases of the love episode itself.
It is likely that in highly sensitive and intellectual men some ordinarily unobserved or half-consciously noted phases of action or being are major causes in the man’s premature arrival at the automatic and uncontrollable part of his own action in the love episode. As an illustration might be mentioned the undue prominence taken in an episode by the bodily fragrance (natural, not the result of artificial perfume) noticed and especially dilated upon verbally by one husband, who thereupon completely lost control of himself at an early stage and was unable to gain the allerotic result of his wife’s (prior) erotic acme.
§ 121
As is repeatedly stated in this book, there are other types of reaction on the woman’s part that are unconscious attempts to test his control, and continually used by her. Unconsciously she gains her deepest satisfaction, one that permeates every thought and action of hers until the next subsequent love episode, from her inability to make her husband lose control of himself.