Page:Psychopathia Sexualis (tr. Chaddock, 1892).djvu/155

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MASOCHISM.

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experienced disgust and ill-feeling, and made firm resolutions to do it no more in the future. Once he had the same pleasure in drinking the urine of a nine-year-old boy, with whom he once practiced fellatio. The patient suffers with epileptic insanity.

The cases described in this group form the complete counterpart to group “d” of the sadists.

Still other older cases belong here, which Tardieu (“Étude médico-légale sur les attentats aux mœurs,” p. 206) observed in senile individuals. He describes as “Renifleurs” persons “qui in secretos locos nimirum theatrorum pasticos convenientes quo complures feminæ ad micturiendum festinant, per nares urinali odore excitati, illico se invicem polluunt.” The “Stercoraires” that Taxil (“La prostitution contemporaine”) mentions are, in relation to this subject, unique.

Finally, space is here given to the following case, reported to me by a physician:—

Case 72. A notary, known from his youth to those about him as peculiar and misanthropic. During his school-days he was given to masturbation. According to his own story, he excited his sexual desire by spreading out on the cover of his bed pieces of toilet-paper that he had used, induced erection by regarding and smelling them, and then practiced masturbation. After his death, by the side of his bed, there was found a large basket of such papers, with the dates marked on them. Here there were probably fancies of the nature of the above-mentioned acts.

(d) Masochism in Women.—In woman voluntary subjection to the opposite sex is a physiological phenomenon. Owing to her passive rôle in procreation and long-existent social conditions, ideas of subjection are, in woman, normally connected with the idea of sexual relations. So to speak, they form the harmonics which determine the tone-quality of feminine feeling.

Any one conversant with the history of civilization knows in what a state of absolute subjection woman was always kept until a relatively high degree of civilization was reached;^[1] and an attentive observer of life may still easily recognize how the custom of unnumbered generations, in connection with the

↑ The laws of the early Middle Ages gave the husband the right to kill the wife; those of the later Middle Ages, the right to beat her. The latter right was used freely, even by those of high standing (comp. Schultze, Das höfische Leben zur zeit des Minnesangs, Bd. i, p. 163 et seq.). Yet, by the side of this, the paradoxical chivalry of the Middle Ages stands unexplained.

[1] The laws of the early Middle Ages gave the husband the right to kill the wife; those of the later Middle Ages, the right to beat her. The latter right was used freely, even by those of high standing (comp. Schultze, Das höfische Leben zur zeit des Minnesangs, Bd. i, p. 163 et seq.). Yet, by the side of this, the paradoxical chivalry of the Middle Ages stands unexplained.

[1]