Apart from masturbation, sexual crimes are relatively frequent in religious paranoia.
Marc's work (p. 160) contains a remarkable example of religious insanity.
Giraud (Annal. méd. psychol.) has reported a case of rape of a little girl by a religious paranoiac, aged 43, who was temporarily erotic. Here, also, belongs a case of incest (Liman, Vierteljahrsschr. f. ger. Med.).
Case 165. M. impregnated his daughter. His wife, mother of eighteen children, and herself pregnant by her husband, lodged the complaint. M. had had religious paranoia for two years. "It was revealed to me that I should beget the Eternal Son with my daughter. Then a man of flesh and blood would arise by my faith, who would be eighteen hundred years old. He would be a bridge between the Old and New Testaments." This command, which he deemed divine, was the cause of his insane act.
Sexual acts that have a pathological motive sometimes occur in persecutory paranoia.
Case 166. A married woman of thirty had, by means of money and sweetmeats, enticed a boy of five, who played near her, handled his genitals, and then attempted coitus. She was a teacher, who had been betrayed and then cast off. Previously moral, for some time she had given herself to prostitution. The explanation of her immoral change was given, when it was found that she had various delusions of persecution, and thought she was under the secret influence of her seducer, who impelled her to sexual acts. She also believed that the boy had been put in her way by her seducer. Coarse sensuality as a motive for her crime came less into consideration, as it would have been easy for her to satisfy sexual desire in a natural way. (Küssner, Berl. klin. Wochenschrift.)
Cullerre ("Perversions sexuelles chez les persécutés," in Annal. médico-psychol., March, 1886) has reported similar cases,—the case of a patient who, suffering with paranoia sexualis persecutoria, tried to violate his sister, giving as a reason that the impulse was given him by Bonapartists.
In another case a captain, suffering with delusions of persecution by electro-magnetism, was driven to pederasty,—a thing he abhorred. In a similar case the persecutor impelled to onanism and pederasty.
