st no feature, article of dress, attitude, act," Stanley
Hall declares, "or even animal or perhaps object in nature, that may not
have to some morbid soul specialized erogenic and erethic power."[6] Even
a mere shadow may become a fetich. Goron tells of a merchant in Paris--a
man with a reputation for ability, happily married and the father of a
family, altogether irreproachable in his private life--who was returning
home one evening after a game of billiards with a friend, when, on
chancing to raise his eyes, he saw against a lighted window the shadow of
a woman changing her chemise. He fell in love with that shadow and
returned to the spot every evening for many months to gaze at the window.
Yet--and herein lies the fetichism--he made no attempt to see the woman or
to find out who she was; the shadow sufficed; he had no need of the
realty.[7] It is even possible to have a negative fetich, the absence of
some character being alone demanded, and the case has been recorded in
Chicago of an American gentleman of average intelligence, education, and
good habits who, having as a boy cherished a pure affection for a girl
whose leg had been amputated, throughout life was relatively impotent with
normal women, but experienced passion and affection for women who had lost
a leg; he was found by his wife to be in extensive correspondence with
one-legged women all over the country, expending no little money on the
purchase of artificial legs for his various protegees.[8]

It is important to remember, however, that while erotic symbolism becomes
fantastic and abnormal in its extreme manifestations, it is in its
essence absolutely normal. It is only in the very grossest forms of sexual
desire that it is altogether absent. Stendhal described the mental side of
the process of tumescence as a crystallization, a process whereby certain
features of the beloved person present points around which the emotions
held in solution in the lover's mind may concentrate and deposit
themselves in dazzling brilliance. This process inevitably tends to take
place around all those features and objects associated with the beloved
person which have most deeply impressed the lover's mind, and the more
sensitive and imaginative and emotional he is the more certainly will such
features and objects crystallize into erotic symbols. "Devotion and love,"
wrote Mary Wollstonecraft, "may be allowed to hallow the garments as well
as the person, for the lover must wan