sister’s foot. Immediately after ejaculation he would become angry with himself at having been weak again. His partiality for his sister’s foot had cost him many a sleepless night. He often wondered that he could still love his sister. Although it seemed right to him that she should conceal her feet from him, yet he was often irritated because the concealment caused him to have pollutions. The patient gives assurances of being moral in other respects, which are confirmed by his relatives.
Case 68. S., New York, is accused of being a street-thief. Numerous cases of insanity in his ancestry; father, brother, and sister mentally abnormal. At seven years, violent cerebral concussion twice. At thirteen, struck with a beam. At fourteen S. had violent attacks of headache. Accompanying these attacks, or immediately after them, peculiar impulse to take the shoes of female members of the family—as a rule, those belonging to one member—and hide them in some out-of-the-way corner. Taken to task, he would lie, or declare that he had no memory of the affair. The passion for shoes was unconquerable, and made its appearance every three or four months. On one occasion he attempted to take the shoe from the foot of one of the servants, and on another he stole his sister’s shoe from her sleeping-apartment. In the spring two ladies had their shoes torn from their feet in the open street. In August S. left his home early in the morning to go to his work as a printer. A moment afterward he tore the shoe from a girl’s foot in the open street, fled to his place of work, and there was arrested as a street-thief. He declared that he did not know much of his act; that it had come upon him like a stroke of lightning, at the sight of a shoe, that he must possess himself of it, but for what purpose he did not know. He had acted while in a state of unconsciousness. The shoe, as he correctly indicated, was found in his coat. In confinement he was so much excited mentally that an outbreak of insanity was feared. Discharged, he stole his wife’s shoes while she slept. His moral character and habits of life were blameless. He was an intelligent workman; but irregularity of employment, that soon followed, made him confused and incapable of work. Pardoned. (Nichols, Am. Journal of Insanity, 1859; Beck, “Med. Jurisprudence,” vol. i, p. 732, 1860.)Dr. Pascal (op. cit.) has some similar cases, and many others have been mentioned to me by colleagues and patients.
(c) Disgusting Acts for the Purpose of Self-Humiliation and Sexual Gratification—Larvated Masochism.—There are numerous established cases in which perverted men are thrown into sexual excitement by the secretions, or even the excretions, of women, and try to see and touch them. Probably in these cases there is almost always an unconscious masochistic impulse,
