the following strange case, for which I am indebted to a communication from Dr. Körber, of Rankau:—
Case 55. A lady makes me the following communication: While still a young and innocent girl, she was married to a man of about thirty years. On their wedding-night he forced a towel and soap into her hands, and, without any other expression of love, wanted her to lather his chin and neck (as if for shaving). The inexperienced young wife did it, and was not a little astonished, during the first weeks of married life, to learn its secrets in absolutely no other form. Her husband always told her that it gave him the greatest delight to have his face lathered by her. Later, after she had sought the advice of friends, she induced her husband to perform coitus, and had three children in the course of time (by him, she states with every assurance). The husband is industrious and reliable, but a moody man, with little perseverance; by occupation a merchant.
It may be inferred that this man conceived the act of being shaved (i.e., the lathering as a preparatory measure) as a rudimentary, symbolic realization of ideas of injury or death, or of fancies about knives; like those the man previously mentioned had had in his youth, and by means of which he had been sexually excited and satisfied. The perfect sadistic counterpart to this case, looked upon in this light, is offered by Case 35, which is a case of symbolic sadism.
At any rate, there is a whole group of masochists who satisfy themselves with the symbolic representations of situations corresponding with their perversion; a group that corresponds with group “e” of “symbolic” sadists, just as the previously mentioned cases of masochism correspond with the groups “c” and “a” of sadism. Thus, just as the perverse longings of the masochist may, on the one hand, advance to “passive lust-murder” (to be sure, only in imagination); so, on the other hand, they may be satisfied with simple symbolic representations of the desired situations, which otherwise are expressed in acts of cruelty (this, of course, taken objectively, goes much further than the idea of being murdered, but in fact not so far, owing to the determining subjective conditions).
With Case 55, other similar cases should be here described, in which the acts desired and planned by the masochist have a
