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.
