Many of her acquaintances had thought that she should really have been a man.
The patient says that-she was never sensual. In embracing female friends, she had often experienced a peculiar lustful feeling. Embracing and kissing had been her only manner of expressing her friendship.
The patient states that she comes of a nervous father, and an insane mother who, as a young girl, had been passionately in love with her own brother, and had tried to induce him to flee with her to America. The patient’s brother is a very eccentric, peculiar man.
The patient presents no external degenerative signs; head regular. She says the menses began at fourteen, and that they have been regular, but always painful.
Case 121. “In order to designate at once my unhappy diseased condition with its correct name, I will state at the beginning that it bears all the marks of what, in your work, ‘Psychopathia Sexualis,’ you have named effemination.
“I am now thirty-eight years old, and, thanks to my abnormality, I look back on a life that has been full of indescribable suffering; so that I am often astonished to think what capacity for suffering a man has. Of late consciousness of the suffering I have endured has become the source of a kind of self-respect, which, in itself, makes my life, in a measure, endurable.
“But I shall now endeavor to describe my condition with all truth. I am physically healthy, and, as far as I can remember, have never had any severe illness. I come of a healthy family. But my parents are both of a very excitable nature, my father being of the so-called choleric, and my mother of the sanguine, temperament; she has a strong tendency to mild melancholia. She is a lively woman, loved for her good-heartedness and active benevolence; but she is still very dependent and deficient in self-confidence. All these peculiarities were marked in her father. I mention this fact, because I am told that I resemble them both; and as far as the last two peculiarities are concerned, I can myself acknowledge the resemblance. But when I made attempts, by means of my inner strength and by thinking of my own power, to rend the bond that, with magic force, draws me to men, there was always a residuum left that I could not eradicate. As far as I can remember, I have always had this elementary longing for a male lover. To be sure, its first expressions were of a coarse, sensual nature. I do not know whether I was yet ten years old, when, while lying in bed in the day-time, I suddenly discovered how, by pressure on my genitals, I induced a new and intoxicating feeling, while fancying that a man of my acquaintance performed sensual manipulations on me. It was only many years afterward that I learned that this was onanism. At first I was so frightened and so depressed by the inexplicableness of my longing, that I then made my first attempt at
