" It is important to understand that an enormous amount of our human experience is really a response to symbols. I speak in Origins of the Sexual Impulse of an underwear fetichist who stopped the car when he was driving with his wife, went into a garden, and removed a brassiere and panties from a clothesline; he laid these on the ground, and proceeded to go through the motions of copulation with them. Response to the symbol of ‘forbidden-ness’—another woman’s underwear—was obviously stronger than his response to the actuality of his wife beside him in the car. This is the peculiarity of human beings: that a symbol can gain a hold on the imagination and cause a more powerful response than the actuality that it represents. Control "

― Colin Wilson , The Occult