[200] _Obstetric Journal_, vol. i, 1873, p. 558. Cf.
G.J. Arnold,
_British, Medical Journal_, January 6, 1906, p. 21.
[201] Dudley, _American Journal of Obstetrics_, July, 1889, p. 758.
[202] A. Reverdin, "Epingles à Cheveux dans la Vessie,"
_Revue Médicale de
la Suisse Romande_, January 20, 1888. His cases are fully recorded, and
his paper is an able and interesting contribution to this by-way of sexual
psychology. The first case was a school-master's wife, aged 22, who
confessed in her husband's presence, without embarrassment or hesitation,
that the manoeuvre was habitual, learned from a school-companion, and
continued after marriage. The second was a single woman of 42, a _curé's_
servant, who attempted to elude confession, but on leaving the doctor's
house remarked to the house-maid, "Never go to bed without taking out your
hair-pins; accidents happen so easily." The third was an English girl of
17 who finally acknowledged that she had lost two hair-pins in this way.
The fourth was a child of 12, driven by the pain to confess that the
practice had become a habit with her.
[203] "One of my patients," remarks Dr. R.T. Morris, of New York,
(_Transactions of the American Association of Obstetricians_, for 1892,
Philadelphia, vol. v), "who is a devout church-member, had never allowed
herself to entertain sexual thoughts referring to men, but she masturbated
every morning, when standing before the mirror, by rubbing against a key
in the bureau-drawer. A man never excited her passions, but the sight of a
key in any bureau-drawer aroused erotic desires."
[204] Freud (_Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie_, p.
118) refers to the
sexual pleasure of swinging. Swinging another person may be a source of
voluptuous excitement, and one of the 600 forms of sexual pleasure
enumerated in De Sade's _Les 120 Journées de Sodome_ is (according to
Dühren) to propel a girl vigorously in a swing.
[205] The fact that horse exercise may produce pollutions was well
recognized by Catholic theologians, and Sanchez states that this fact need
not be made a reason for traveling on foot. Rolfincius, in 1667, pointed
out that horse-riding, in those unaccustomed to it, may lead to nocturnal
pollutions. Rohleder (_Die Masturbation_, pp. 133-134) brings together
evidence regarding the influence of horse exercise in producing sexual
excitement.
[206] A correspondent, to whom the idea was presented for the first time,
wrote: "Henceforward I shall know to what I must attribute the
bliss--almost the beatitude--I so often have experienced after traveling
for four or five hours in a train." Penta mentions the case of a young
girl who first experienced sexual desire at the age of twelve, after a
railway journey.
[207] Langdon Down, _British Medical Journal_, January 12, 1867.
[208] Pouillet, _L'Onanisme chez la Femme_, Paris, 1880; Fournier, _De
l'Onanisme_, 1885; Rohleder, _Die Masturbation_, p. 132.
[209] _West-Riding Asylum Reports_, 1876, vol. vi.
[210] _Das Nervöse Weib_, 1898, p. 193.
[211] In the Appendix to volume iii of these _Studies_, I have recorded
the experience of a lady who found sexual gratification in this manner.
[212] Dr. J.G. Kiernan, to whom I am indebted for a note on this point,
calls my attention also to the case of a homosexual and masochistic man
(_Medical Record_, vol. xix) whose feelings were intensified by
tight-lacing.
[213] Some women are also able to produce the orgasm, when in a state of
sexual excitement, by placing a cushion between the knees and pressing the
thighs firmly together.
[214] _Leçons sur les Déformations Vulvaires_, p. 64.
Martineau was
informed by a dressmaker that it is very frequent in workrooms and can
usually be done without attracting attention. An ironer informed him that
while standing at her work, she crossed her legs, slightly bending the
trunk forward and supporting herself on the table by the hands; then a few
movements of contraction of the adductor muscles of the thigh would
suffice to produce the orgasm.
[215] C.W. Townsend, "Thigh-friction in Children under one Year," Annual
Meeting of the American Pediatric Society, Montreal, 1896. Five cases are
recorded by this writer, all in female infants.
[216] Soutzo, _Archives de Neurologie_, February, 1903, p. 167.
[217] Zache, _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1899, p. 72.
I have discussed
what may be regarded as the normally sexual influence of dancing, in the
third volume of these _Studies_, "The Analysis of the Sexual Impulse."
[218] The case has been recorded of a Russian who had the spontaneous
impulse to self-flagellation on the nates with a rod, for the sake of
sexual excitement, from the age of 6. (_Rivista Mensile di Psichiatria_
April, 1900, p. 102.)
[219] Kryptadia, vol. v, p. 358. As regards the use of nettles, see
Dühren, _Geschlechtsleben in England_, Bd. II, p. 392.
[220] Debreyne, _Moechialogie_, p. 177.
[221] R.W. Taylor, _A Practical Treatise on Sexual Disorders_, 3rd ed.,
Ch. XXX.
[222] Hammond, _Sexual Impotence_, pp. 70 et seq.
[223] Niceforo, _Il Gergo_, p. 98.
[224] _Functional Disorders of the Nervous System in Women_, p. 114.
[225] Schrenck-Notzing, _Suggestions-therapie_, p. 13.
A. Kind (_Jahrbuch
für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen_, Jahrgang ix, 1908, p. 58) gives the case of
a young homosexual woman, a trick cyclist at the music halls, who often,
when excited by the sight of her colleague in tights, would experience the
orgasm while cycling before the public.
[226] Janet has, however, used day-dreaming--which he calls "_reveries
subconscients_"--to explain a remarkable case of demon-possession, which
he investigated and cured. (_Névroses et Idées fixes_, vol. i, pp. 390 et
seq.)
[227] "Minor Studies from the Psychological Laboratory of Wellesley
College," _American Journal of Psychology_, vol. vii, No. 1. G.E.
Partridge ("Reverie," _Pedagogical Seminary_, April, 1898) well describes
the physical accompaniments of day-dreaming, especially in Normal School
girls between sixteen and twenty-two. Pick ("Clinical Studies in
Pathological Dreaming," _Journal of Mental Sciences_, July, 1901) records
three more or less morbid cases of day-dreaming, usually with an erotic
basis, all in apparently hysterical men. An important study of
day-dreaming, based on the experiences of nearly 1,500
young people (more
than two-thirds girls and women), has been published by Theodate L. Smith
("The Psychology of Day Dreams," _American Journal Psychology_, October,
1904). Continued stories were found to be rare--only one per cent. Healthy
boys, before fifteen, had day-dreams in which sports, athletics, and
adventure had a large part; girls put themselves in the place of their
favorite heroines in novels. After seventeen, and earlier in the case of
girls, day-dreams of love and marriage were found to be frequent. A
typical confession is that of a girl of nineteen: "I seldom have time to
build castles in Spain, but when I do, I am not different from most
Southern girls; i.e., my dreams are usually about a pretty fair specimen
of a six-foot three-inch biped."
[228] The case has been recorded of a married woman, in love with her
doctor, who kept a day-dream diary, at last filling three bulky volumes,
when it was discovered by her husband, and led to an action for divorce;
it was shown that the doctor knew nothing of the romance in which he
played the part of hero. Kiernan, in referring to this case (as recorded
in John Paget's _Judicial Puzzles_), mentions a similar case in Chicago.
[229] _Uranisme_, p. 125.
[230] The acute Anstie remarked, more than thirty years ago, in his work
on _Neuralgia_: "It is a comparatively frequent thing to see an unsocial,
solitary life (leading to the habit of masturbation) joined with the bad
influence of an unhealthy ambition, prompting to premature and false work
in literature and art." From the literary side, M. Léon Bazalgette has
dealt with the tendency of much modern literature to devote itself to what
he calls "mental onanism," of which the probable counterpart, he seems to
hint, is a physical process of auto-erotism. (Léon Bazalgette, "L'onanisme
considéré comme principe createur en art," _L'Esprit Nouveau_, 1898.)
[231] Pausanias, _Achaia_, Chapter XVII. The ancient Babylonians believed
in a certain "maid of the night," who appeared to men in sleep and roused
without satisfying their passions. (Jastrow, _Religion of Babylonia_, p.
262.) This succubus was the Assyrian Liler, connected with the Hebrew
Lilith. There was a corresponding incubus, "the little night man," who had
nocturnal intercourse with women. (Cf. Ploss, _Das Weib_, 7th ed., pp. 521
et seq.) The succubus and the incubus (the latter being more common) were
adopted by Christendom; St. Augustine (_De Civitate Dei_, Bk. XV, Ch.
XXIII) said that the wicked assaults of sylvans and fauns, otherwise
called incubi, on women, are so generally affirmed that it would be
impudent to deny them. Incubi flourished in mediæval belief, and can
scarcely, indeed, be said to be extinct even to-day.
They have been
studied by many authors; see, e.g., Dufour, _Histoire de la Prostitution_,
vol. v, Ch. XXV, Saint-André, physician-in-ordinary to the French King,
pointed out in 1725 that the incubus was a dream. It may be added that the
belief in the succubus and incubus appears to be widespread. Thus, the
West African Yorubas (according to A.B. Ellis) believe that erotic dreams
are due to the god Elegbra, who, either as a male or a female, consorts
with men and women in sleep.
[232] "If any man's seed of copulation go out from him, then he shall
bathe all his flesh in water and be unclean until the even. And every
garment, and every skin, whereon is the seed of copulation, shall be
washed with water and be unclean until the even."
Leviticus, XV, v. 16-17.
[233] It should be added that the term _pollutio_ also covers voluntary
effusion of semen outside copulation. (Debreyne, _Moechialogie_,
p. 8; for a full discussion of the opinions of theologians concerning
nocturnal and diurnal pollutions, see the same author's _Essai sur la
Théologie Morale_, pp. 100-149.)
[234] _Memoirs_, translated by Bendyshe, p. 182.
[235] _Sexual Impotence_, p. 137.
[236] _L'Hygiène Sexuelle_, p. 169.
[237] _Sexualleben und Nervenleiden_, p. 164.
[238] I may here refer to the curious opinion expressed by Dr. Elizabeth
Blackwell, that, while the sexual impulse in man is usually relieved by
seminal emissions during sleep, in women it is relieved by the occurrence
of menstruation. This latter statement is flagrantly at variance with the
facts; but it may perhaps be quoted in support of the view expressed above
as to the comparative rarity of sexual excitement during sleep in young
girls.
[239] Löwenfeld has recently expressed the same opinion.
Rohleder believes
that pollutions are physically impossible in a _real_
virgin, but that
opinion is too extreme.
[240] It may be added that in more or less neurotic women and girls,
erotic dreams may be very frequent and depressing. Thus, J.M. Fothergill
(_West-Riding Asylum Report_, 1876, vol. vi) remarks:
"These dreams are
much more frequent than is ordinarily thought, and are the cause of a
great deal of nervous depression among women. Women of a highly-nervous
diathesis suffer much more from these drains than robust women. Not only
are these involuntary orgasms more frequent among such women, but they
cause more disturbance of the general health in them than in other women."
[241] I may remark here that a Russian correspondent considers that I have
greatly underestimated the frequency of erotic manifestations during sleep
in young girls. "All the women I have interrogated on this point," he
informs me, "say that they have had such pollutions from the time of
puberty, or even earlier, accompanied by erotic dreams.
I have put the
question to some twenty or thirty women. It is true that they were of
southern race (Italian, Spanish, and French), and I believe that
Southerners are, in this matter, franker than northern women, who consider
the activity of the flesh as shameful, and seek to conceal it." My
correspondent makes no reference to the chief point of sexual difference,
so far as my observation goes, which is that erotic dreams are
comparatively rare in those women "_who have yet had no sort of sexual
experience in waking life_." Whether or not this is correct, I do not
question the frequency of erotic dreams in girls who have had such
experience.
[242] C.C. Hersman, "Medico-legal Aspects of Eroto-Choreic Insanities,"
_Alienist and Neurologist_, July, 1897. I may mention that Pitres (_Leçons
cliniques sur l'Hystérie_, vol. ii, p. 34) records the almost identical
case of a hysterical girl in one of his wards, who was at first grateful
to the clinical clerk to whom her case was intrusted, but afterward
changed her behavior, accused him of coming nightly through the window,
lying beside her, caressing her, and then exerting violent coitus three or
four times in succession, until she was utterly exhausted. I may here
refer to the tendency to erotic excitement in women under the influence of
chloroform and nitrous oxide, a tendency rarely or never noted in men, and
of the frequency with which the phenomenon is attributed by the subject to
actual assault. See H. Ellis, _Man and Woman_, pp. 269-274.
[243] In Australia, some years ago, a man was charged with rape, found
guilty of "attempt," and sentenced to eighteen months'
imprisonment, on
the accusation of a girl of 13, who subsequently confessed that the charge
was imaginary; in this case, the jury found it impossible to believe that
so young a girl could have been lying, or hallucinated, because she
narrated the details of the alleged offence with such circumstantial
detail. Such cases are not uncommon, and in some measure, no doubt, they
may be accounted for by auto-erotic nocturnal hallucinations.
[244] Sante de Sanctis, _I sogni e il sonno nell'isterismo e nella
epilessia_, Rome, 1896, p. 101.
[245] Pitres, _Leçons cliniques sur l'Hystérie_, vol.
ii, pp. 37 et seq.
The Lorraine inquisitor, Nicolas Remy, very carefully investigated the
question of the feelings of witches when having intercourse with the
Devil, questioning them minutely, and ascertained that such intercourse
was usually extremely painful, filling them with icy horror (See, e.g.,
Dufour, _Histoire de la Prostitution_, vol. v, p. 127; the same author
presents an interesting summary of the phenomena of the Witches' Sabbath).
But intercourse with the Devil was by no means always painful. Isabel
Gowdie, a Scotch witch, bore clear testimony to this point: "The youngest
and lustiest women," she stated, "will have very great pleasure in their
carnal copulation with him, yea, much more than with their own
husbands.... He is abler for us than any man can be.
(Alack! that I should
compare him to a man!)" Yet her description scarcely sounds attractive; he
was a "large, black, hairy man, very cold, and I found his nature as cold
within me as spring well-water." His foot was forked and cloven; he was
sometimes like a deer, or a roe; and he would hold up his tail while the
witches kissed that region (Pitcairn, _Criminal Trials in Scotland_, vol.
iii, Appendix VII; see, also, the illustrations at the end of Dr. A.
Marie's _Folie et Mysticisme_, 1907).
[246] Gilles de la Tourette, loc. cit., p. 518. Erotic hallucinations have
also been studied by Bellamy, in a Bordeaux thesis, _Hallucinations
Erotiques_, 1900-1901.
[247] On one occasion, when still a girl, whenever an artist whom she
admired touched her hand she felt erection and moisture of the sexual
parts, but without any sensation of pleasure; a little later, when an
uncle's knee casually came in contact with her thigh, ejaculation of mucus
took place, though she disliked the uncle; again, when a nurse, on
casually seeing a man's sexual organs, an electric shock went through her,
though the sight was disgusting to her; and when she had once to assist a
man to urinate, she became in the highest degree excited, though without
pleasure, and lay down on a couch in the next room, while a conclusive
ejaculation took place. (Moll, _Libido Sexualis_, Bd. I, p. 354.)
[248] Breuer and Freud, _Studien über Hysterie_, 1895, p. 217.
[249] Calmeil (_De la Folie_, vol. i, p. 252) called attention to the
large part played by uterine sensations in the hallucinations of some
famous women ascetics, and added: "It is well recognized that the
narrative of such sensations nearly always occupies the first place in the
divagations of hysterical virgins."
[250] H. Leuba, "Les Tendances Religieuses chez les Mystiques Chrétiens,"
_Revue Philosophique_, November, 1902, p. 465. St.
Theresa herself states
that physical sensations played a considerable part in this experience.
II.
Hysteria and the Question of Its Relation to the Sexual Emotions--The
Early Greek Theories of its Nature and Causation--The Gradual Rise of
Modern Views--Charcot--The Revolt Against Charcot's Too Absolute
Conclusions--Fallacies Involved--Charcot's Attitude the Outcome of his
Personal Temperament--Breuer and Freud--Their Views Supplement and
Complete Charcot's--At the Same Time they Furnish a Justification for the
Earlier Doctrine of Hysteria--But They Must Not be Regarded as Final--The
Diffused Hysteroid Condition in Normal Persons--The Physiological Basis of
Hysteria--True Pathological Hysteria is Linked on to almost Normal States,
especially to Sex-hunger.
The nocturnal hallucinations of hysteria, as all careful students of this
condition now seem to agree, are closely allied to the hysterical attack
proper. Sollier, indeed, one of the ablest of the more recent
investigators of hysteria, has argued with much force that the subjects of
hysteria really live in a state of pathological sleep, of
vigilambulism.[251] He regards all the various accidents of hysteria as
having a common basis in disturbances of sensibility, in the widest sense
of the word "sensibility,"--as the very foundation of personality,--while
anæsthesia is "the real _sigillum hysteriæ_." Whatever the form of
hysteria, we are thus only concerned with a more or less profound state of
vigilambulism: a state in which the subject seems, often even to himself,
to be more or less always asleep, whether the sleep may be regarded as
local or general. Sollier agrees with Féré that the disorder of
sensibility may be regarded as due to an exhaustion of the sensory centres
of the brain, whether as the result of constitutional cerebral weakness,
of the shock of a violent emotion, or of some toxic influence on the
cerebral cells.
We may, therefore, fitly turn from the auto-erotic phenomena of sleep
which in women generally, and especially in hysterical women, seem to
possess so much importance and significance, to the question--which has
been so divergently answered at different periods and by different
investigators--concerning the causation of hysteria, and especially
concerning its alleged connection with conscious or unconscious sexual
emotion.[252]
It was the belief of the ancient Greeks that hysteria came from the womb;
hence its name. We first find that statement in Plato's _Timæus_: "In men
the organ of generation--becoming rebellious and masterful, like an animal
disobedient to reason, and maddened with the sting of lust--seeks to gain
absolute sway; and the same is the case with the so-called womb, or
uterus, of women; the animal within them is desirous of procreating
children, and, when remaining unfruitful long beyond its proper time, gets
discontented and angry, and, wandering in every direction through the
body, closes up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing
respiration,[253] drives them to extremity, causing all varieties of
disease."
Plato, it is true, cannot be said to reveal anywhere a very scientific
attitude toward Nature. Yet he was here probably only giving expression to
the current medical doctrine of his day. We find precisely the same
doctrine attributed to Hippocrates, though without a clear distinction
between hysteria and epilepsy.[254] If we turn to the best Roman
physicians we find again that Aretæus, "the Esquirol of antiquity," has
set forth the same view, adding to his description of the movements of the
womb in hysteria: "It delights, also, in fragrant smells, and advances
toward them; and it has an aversion to foetid smells, and flies from them;
and, on the whole, the womb is like an animal within an animal."[255]
Consequently, the treatment was by applying foetid smells to the nose and
rubbing fragrant ointments around the sexual parts.[256]
The Arab physicians, who carried on the traditions of Greek medicine,
appear to have said nothing new about hysteria, and possibly had little
knowledge of it. In Christian mediæval Europe, also, nothing new was added
to the theory of hysteria; it was, indeed, less known medically than it
had ever been, and, in part it may be as a result of this ignorance, in
part as a result of general wretchedness (the hysterical phenomena of
witchcraft reaching their height, Michelet points out, in the fourteenth
century, which was a period of special misery for the poor), it flourished
more vigorously. Not alone have we the records of nervous epidemics, but
illuminated manuscripts, ivories, miniatures, bas-reliefs, frescoes, and
engravings furnish the most vivid iconographic evidence of the prevalence
of hysteria in its most violent forms during the Middle Ages. Much of this
evidence is brought to the service of science in the fascinating works of
Dr. P. Richer, one of Charcot's pupils.[257]
In the seventeenth century Ambroise Paré was still talking, like
Hippocrates, about "suffocation of the womb"; Forestus was still, like
Aretæus, applying friction to the vulva; Fernel was still reproaching
Galen, who had denied that the movements of the womb produced hysteria.
It was in the seventeenth century (1618) that a French physician, Charles
Lepois (Carolus Piso), physician to Henry II, trusting, as he said, to
experience and reason, overthrew at one stroke the doctrine of hysteria