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An interesting study conducted in Paris over many years has shown that as people come to take their bodies as more and more complete definitions of their own sexuality, the "symbolizing" of the body becomes less and less easy for them. As sexuality becomes an absolute state fixed in the form of the body, the people who are those bodies have increasing difficulty imagining phallic forms in natural organisms such as plants or feeling a relationship between bodily movement and the action of a cylinder or a bellows. The enshrining of the body as an absolute sexual state is narcissistic because it makes sexuality exclusively an attribute of the person, a state of being rather than an activity, and therefore essentially isolated from the sexual experience the person may or may not have. The study concludes that the result of this narcissism is a decrease in "metaphorical" imagination of the body, which is to say an impoverishment of the cognitive activity of creating a symbol out of a physical thing. —Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man