As to the frequency[1] of the occurrence of the anomaly, it is difficult to reach a just conclusion, since those affected with it break from their reserve only very infrequently; and in criminal cases the urning with perversion of sexual instinct is usually classed with the person given to pederasty for simply vicious reasons. According to Casper’s and Tardieu’s, as well as my own, experience, this anomaly is much more frequent than reported cases would lead us to presume.
Ulrichs (“Kritische Pfeile,” p. 2, 1880) declares that, on an average, there is one person affected with contrary sexual instinct to every two hundred mature men, or to every eight hundred of the population; and that the percentage among the Magyrs and South Slavs is still greater,—statements which may be regarded as untrustworthy. The subject of one of my cases knows personally, at his home (13,000 inhabitants), fourteen urnings. He further declares that he is acquainted with at least eighty in a city of 60,000 inhabitants. It is to be presumed that this man, otherwise worthy of belief, makes no distinction between the congenital and the acquired anomaly.
1. Psychical Hermaphroditism.[2]—The characteristic mark of this degree of inversion of the sexual instinct is that, by the side of the pronounced sexual instinct and desire for the same sex, a desire toward the opposite sex is present; but the latter is much weaker and is manifested episodically only, while the homo-sexuality is primary, and, in time and intensity, forms the most striking feature of the vita sexualis.
- ↑ That inversion of the sexual instinct is not infrequent is proved, among other things, by the circumstance that it is frequently a subject in novels. Chevalier (op. cit.) points out in French literature, besides the novels of Balzac, like “La Passion au Desert” (treating of bestiality) and “Sarrazine” (treating of the love of a woman for a eunuch), Diderot’s “La Religieuse” (a story of one given to amor lesbicus); Balzac’s “La Filleaux Yeux d’Or” (amor lesbicus); Th. Gautier’s “Mademoiselle de Maupin”; Feydeau’s “La Comtesse de Chalis”; Flaubert’s “Salammbo,” etc. Belot’s “Mademoiselle Giraud, Ma Femme” may also be mentioned (now translated into English). It is interesting that the heroines of these (Lesbian) novels appear in the character and rôle of the husband of a lover of the same sex, and that their love is extremely passionate. Moreover, the neuropathic foundation of this sexual perversion does not escape the writers. This theme is treated, in German literature, in “Fridolin’s heimliche Ehe,” by Wilbrand; in “Brick and Brack oder Licht in Schatten,” by Emerich Graf Stadion. The oldest urning’s romance is probably that published by Petronius at Rome, under the Empire, under the title Satyricon.
- ↑ Comp. author’s work, “Ueber psychosexuales Zwitterthum,” in the internationalen Centralblatt f. d. Physiologie u. Pathologie der Harn und Sexualorgane, Bd. i, Heft 2.
