Author: Havelock Ellis

Publisher: The Minerva Group, Inc.

Published: 2001-10

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0898756014

Under ?Erotic Symbolism? I include practically all the aberrations of the sexual instinct, although some of these have seemed of sufficient importance for separate discussion in previous volumes. It is highly probable that many readers will consider that the name scarcely suffices to cover manifestations so numerous and so varied. The term ?sexual equivalents? will seem preferable to some. ?The Mechanism of Detumescence? brings us at last to the final climax for which the earlier and more prolonged stage of tumescence, which has occupied us so often in these Studies, is the elaborate preliminary. ?The art of love,? a clever woman novelist has written, ?is the art of preparation.? That ?preparation? is, on the physiological side, the production of tumescence, and all courtship is concerned in building up tumescence. But the final conjugation of two individuals in an explosion of detumescence, thus slowly brought about, though it is largely an involuntary act, is still not without its psychological implications and consequences;In the Psychic State of Pregnancy we at last touch the point at which the whole complex process of sex reaches its goal. A woman with a child in her womb is the everlasting miracle which all the romance of love, all the cunning devices of tumescence and detumescence, have been invented to make manifest.