» See both his Libido Sexualis, Berlin, 1898, and Kontrare Sexualempfindung, Berlin, 1899.
* Die Ratsel der Sprache.
SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT 45 ' they love with relative unconsciousness of the physical side, which is merged in higher psychic qualities. Havelock Ellis ^ lays great stress on the fact that these organs are by nature and in a primitive state, like the blossoms of flowers, thought most beautiful and an object of intense and concentrated in- terest and attention. Dress and modesty have tended to divert this interest into many unusual directions, and he suggests may have tended to homosexuality.
Whatever the analyses and localizations of the factors of this instinct, if not before, certainly and at the latest at early puberty, when the changes normal to that period supervene with attendant new sensations, these parts for a time, and especially in boys, play a great and hitherto not adequately recognized role in consciousness. Owing in part to the great variability of form, size, or function, or all together, very many boys suffer from the fear that they are abnormal in form and not infrequently life is for years overcast by apprehensions. Incidental comparisons with others made, for instance, in bath- ing, are very apt to suggest, as variability is so great, individual abnormality. Cases are given where several boys recently de- veloped, on seeing others, have thought themselves deformed, and suffered acutely with manifold forebodings for the future. These fears often deepen into phobias when connected with the new activities normal to this period, and every variation is ascribed by a hypersensitive consciousness to abnormality of function or sin. From cases which might fill a small volume, I select here as typical one only, viz., that of a doctor of philosophy, prominent in his profession and a father of several healthful children, who writes in substance: ^ The one greatest fear of all my boyhood was connected with my sexual organs; the big boys would expose us little ones, and said mine were too small. I began to brood over this, age eight; felt disgraced, and haunted with forebodings; one day there seemed a very slight inflammation, age twelve; I thought I had done a nameless sin, and prayed God to let me get well, which I soon did, but a morbid asso- ciation between it and a hen's neck long persisted; I read literature on lost manhood, self-abuse, etc.; fancied I had all the diseases, and had committed the unpardonable sin; the first spontaneous emission * The Psychology of Sex, vol. i, p. 109.
• See my Study of Fears, Am. Jour, of Psy., January, 1S97, vol. viii, p. 225.
45 2 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE nearly paralyzed me, but although I found myself still alive, felt that my days were numbered; I corresponded with a quack, and later began to study my urine with great alarm, and found plenty of marks of disease; there were reddish and whitish settlings, lack of color and overcolor, strong smell and no smell, it was too clear, too thick, too copious, too scanty, or, worst of all, had an iridescent scum; when fourteen I gradually settled to the fact that I was sexually abnormal, might possibly live seven years, till twenty-one, and then find what I had heard was a sure cure in marriage; I found encouragement from quack advertisements, which said the wretched beings sometimes held out for years; I lived on, and people said I was in robust health, but it was years before I realized that I was perfectly normal; Bible pas- sages greatly aggravated my fears, such as one in Deut. xxiii, and others; as I look back, my entire youth from six to eighteen was made miserable from lack of knowledge that any one who knew anything of the nature of puberty might have given; this long sense of defect, dread of operations, shame and worry has left an indelible mark.
Dr. Seerley tells me he sees one hundred cases a year of young men who deem their case hopeless. One typical youth of good heredity and otherwise normal decided that he would not go to college, was ruined, and must soon inevitably become insane. Another bought a revolver and planned, after a fare- well visit to his mother in a distant town, to shoot himself in despair. Another selected a spot at the river where he would drown himself, which he prepared to do, but almost by acci- dent met a physician who persuaded him after two hours that he was all right, when he went to work with renewed courage, and now seems entering upon a promising career. Another young man selected a cord, which he carried in his pocket for a long time, trying to muster courage to hang himself, because he could only disgrace his friends and his parents, who had made so many sacrifices for him. Another gave up a promising career and shipped on a long voyage, hoping to find this a cure. Another turned on the gas at night, but was discovered and saved in time, etc.
Perhaps masturbation is the most perfect type of individual vice and sin. Where practised, not by the old or by defectives as mitigations of the dangers of procreation for those unfit for it, but by the young, it is perhaps the purest illustration of mere sense pleasure bought at the cost of the higher life. It is destructive of that perhaps most important thing in the world, the potency of good heredity; it is the acme of selfishness; SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT 453 it is the violation of the restraint perhaps most of all im- perative, and yet all we know points to the conclusion that it is far more common among civilized than among savage races, owing in part to the postponement of mar- riage. The ideals of chastity are perhaps the very highest that can be held up to youth during this ever lengthening probationary period. This is the hard price that man must pay for full maturity. Idleness and the protected life of students increase temptation, so does overfeeding, which also increases sterility, so that enjoyment and the power of effective parenthood which God and nature united part company and at a certain variable period become inversely as each other. Although the facts in this chapter may lessen respect for our race and make us less hopeful of its future, the saving fact remains that the outburst of adolescent growth still precedes that of sexual maturity. If this interval were to lessen instead of to increase, so that the race tended, as do abnormal individuals in it, toward a development of the sexual function so premature and intense as to interfere with or obvi- ate the increased rate of growth now normal, this would mean sure ethnic devolution.
V. Whatever the facts concerning the extent of this vice, spontaneous emissions are probably as universal for unmarried youth as menstruation for women. Ignorance of this fact, even by the virtuous and normal, causes an amount of mental anguish in young men perhaps as great as the physical suffering caused by lack of proper instruction to young women beginning their periods. This is not recognized, and even the realization of it is often an immediate and unspeakable relief to those who would be pure. Maturity often first announces itself by nightly experiences that rouse the soul to a state of great alarm, that settles to a brooding anxiety. First let us look at the facts as seen in those who are more mature in their sexual life. I have in my possession three records kept by three unmarried men not far from thirty of their nightly spontaneous discharges, one, the best on record, by a virtuous, active, able man whom I know well, lacking but six months of eight continuous years, and all of them doctors of philosophy, who believed them- selves to be normal. The best of these records averages about 454 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE three and a half such experiences per month, the most fre- quent being 5.14 for July, and the least frequent 2.28 for Sep- tember for all the years taken together. There appears also a slight rise in April and another in November, with a fall in December. Frequency varies considerably in individuals. Here, too, we find a distinct psychic male cycle, but not a tend- ency to monthly groups, as in Nelson's case. On the upward curve there is growing vigor and euphoria and a progressive sense of the intensity of life, and after the climax a brief period of reduced energy. The variations of interval for the month are not great, and for the year in this best eight-year case the minimum number is thirty-seven and the maximum fifty. There is a spring and summer rise corresponding to the sea- sonal welling up of life. The variations in the amount or in- tensity of the climax seem to be quite as great as those in time. Fifty-nine per cent of all were of an interval of a week or less; forty per cent an interval of from one to four days; thirty- four per cent an interval of from eight to seventeen days, the long- est being forty-two days. Poor condition, overwork and under- sleep tend to infrequency. Early morning is the most common time. Special precautions tend to delay, but their influence seems temporary. In low conditions or with unusual fre- quency the crisis is followed by depression, although normally there is a sense of distinct relief. Thus in males there seems to be a normal curve.
Very interesting in these data is the suggestion of a rather sharp line between excess and defect, of which it would almost seem that there is a subtle and rather acute physiological sense or instinct, as if the body or the soul, or both, were endowed by nature with a guiding principle which can be developed as a regulative, but which is easily obscured. This orienting in- stinct, implanted it may be as a special conscience, appears to respond as exquisitely as a sensitive flame, and despite ab- normal habits suggests an original anchorage that is still operative.
Of special significance are the records of dreams and psychic states connected with the orgasms. Sometimes the latter are so entirely lost that waking consciousness finds no trace of them, and they can only be verified by physical results. In other cases there is a full drama of mentation and feeling SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT 455 which can be recalled and written down with much detail. In by far the most cases, however, consciousness, even when the act causes full awakening from sleep, finds only, scattered images, single words, gestures and acts, many of which would perhaps normally constitute no provocation. Many times the mental activity seems to be remote and incidental, and the mind retains in the morning nothing except perhaps a peculiar dress pattern, the shape of a finger nail, the back of a neck, the toss of a head, the movement of a foot, or the dressing of the hair. In such cases these images stand out for a time with the distinct- ness of a cameo and suggest that the origin of erotic fetishisms is largely to be found in sexual dreams. Very rarely is there any imagery of the organs themselves, but the tendency to irra- diation is so strong as to reenforce the suggestion of so many other phenomena in this field that nature designs this experience to be long circuited and that it may give a peculiar ictus to almost any experience. Where waking occurs just afterward it seems at least possible that there may be much imagery that existed, but failed to be recalled to memory, pos- sibly because the flow of psychic impressions was over very familiar fields, and this, therefore, was forgotten, while any eruption into new or unwonted channels stood out with dis- tinctness. All these psychic phenomena, although very char- acteristic of man in his prime, are not so of the dreams of dawning puberty, which are far more vivid.
We have another very interesting suggestion of the tend- ency to irradiation in the fact that the inhibition nisus has become so frequent and strong before the end of the twenties. Before the mind is fully roused from slumber there is very often a blind impulsion to arrest the process or check it in almost any stage. Only in rare cases is this successful, so that sometimes the first waking experience is a sense of loss, waste, or regret. In still other although few cases, consciousness on awaking finds nothing but a vague, diffused glow of pleasure that mounts perhaps almost to ecstasy, a sense that life is im- measurably richer in enjoyment, that there are higher possi- bilities than it has ever entered into the soul before to con- ceive, that life has hitherto been on a low, dull plain, and that everything, or in other cases some one particular thing, has a charm or beauty about it hitherto unsuspected, as if the cerebro- 45^ THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE spinal system, on awakening, found itself impelled by the sym- pathetic system to a fulness and completeness of function which it had lost.
Of course more records and fuller ones are needed before anything better than tentative results can be gained, but the value of such data consists in part in the fact that they sug- gest the problem of how the reproductive function which main- tains the race is originally related to the intellectual function which represents the experiences of the individual. In this field, which, so far as I know, is glimpsed here almost for the first time, it would be perilous to construct theories until more facts are forthcoming.
In his present state there is no doubt that man, in his best years, has normal spontaneous emissions far more frequently than is needful for the purposes of procreation, just as sper- matozoa, as we have seen, are formed in vast and almost incal- culable numbers. Probably in man, during his northward migration, the seasonal intensifications of this function were originally far greater than at present. Protection from wind and weather, the regulation of temperature, comfort, etc., like domesticity in the animal world, tend to obliterate seasonal rhythms, and it would appear also to substitute for these those of the sun's rotation, or especially of the moon and tides. If there have been tendencies to weekly rhythms, it is hard to bring them into relation with the long habit of rest one day in seven, where perhaps they belong in average male maturity. Moreover, if man was originally tropical, it would appear that seasonal differences would have been less and not over compen- sated by increasing adjustments by means of clothing, shelter, etc., as he penetrated northward; so that it is not impossible that the seasonal habit, which, as is well known, is found among races dwelling in the arctic regions, is itself derived from shorter periodicities instead of vice versa. The significance of this rhythm, the range or interval between its two extremes of tension and release, is no doubt of great individual and perhaps racial importance; while everything indicates that in general the longer the rhythm the better, and points to the one conclusion, that restraint is indispensable, and that during a period of more and more years in youth, if they are to mature well as civilization advances; and also that restraint is vastly SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT 457 easier with a normal nature than is often said by those who are neurotic or have tasted too much forbidden fruit. Periodicity is probably as much stamped upon sleep and dream life as upon that of sex. The facts show also even in this field, where all problems of the relations of body and soul and the primacy of either or the concomitancy of both are far more accessible than in that of the muscles and will, how purely and abstractly speculative and impossible of solution, as immortality itself, are such theories as that of Lange and James. The best diatheses are those that gravitate toward the tense state, that develop all the vicarious functions of diversion, work of body and mind, exposure, perhaps exces- sive fatigue, and that find out ways of utilizing sexual tension on many long circuits. Work and occupations of interest that absorb need to be developed during the critical years probation- ary to procreation, with reference to normality there. When we know how to keep tense and use tension in this field we shall have solved some of the fundamental problems of education in all its largest aspects. Some have thought they found utility in a regimen of imagery more or less lewd, as a back fire or men- tal inoculation against too frequent orgasms, while others, let us hope more normal and more truly, have thought they found it in impulses to conceptions which suffuse the soul with a higher eroticism of the good, the beautiful, and the true.
Now, self-abuse greatly complicates this experience, and makes this function vastly more labile, as indeed do lascivious thoughts, imagery, and especially anxiety. If secret vice is practised before, the later teens often bring revulsion. Wis- dom from within and without has by this time developed a sense of self-condemnation or fear, and reform is attempted and often achieved, but increased tension and the stress of the past habit augment spontaneous pollution in sleep. This causes fear, sometimes amounting to terror, lest control be lost and life now given over into the hands of blind and lethal pow- ers against which conscious will and resolution are of no avail. Masturbation is felt to be controllable and the victim feels that he can stop at any time, but spontaneous emissions give a sense of being powerless in the hands of fate. Free will is lost and the youth feels helplessly possessed by his automatism. This frequently brings a dumb despair that 458 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE saps all the joy of life, may make it intolerable and lead to suicide. It is a little as if girls were led to feel when their periods come that they were in consequence of their own mis- doings. The innate modesty of the young soul makes it all so sacredly secret that he can not muster courage to reveal his condition and appeal for help. Those to \\ liom he should turn, who could inform and help by veiled hints and remote sugges- tions (for his apperception organs in this field give him pro- digious understanding), are just those he feels it hardest to ap- proach. Highly sensitized in every fiber, he fears censure or rebuke, and the very thought of that from those nearest and dearest he can not bear. The humiliation would be too great. Sometimes he tries to lead up to the topic indirectly, or tells his own troubles in the third person, or elaborately makes openings for conversation or instruction upon the subject, only to find that his elders feel positive reluctance to talk of it, or he asks directly only to find an ignorance equal to his own. Self-abuse is often common knowledge among mates, but not this involun- tary experience. Thus he is twice helpless: he can do nothing to save himself, and he has learned that there is no help for him in his natural environment. There is no state or condition in life that the common phraseology of personal and hereditary sin and depravity fits so well as this. The young man is fighting the hottest battle of his life with the devil solitary and alone. Often his ill-judged and ignorant precautions themselves, and always and especially his concern, directly aggravate his troubles. Literature that treats of any aspect of sex, and often the worst sources of information only are accessible, is devoured with an avidity felt in no other subject. There is a great hun- ger to know the laws of life and reproduction. Every instinct impels to find again the right way. There is a self-loathing and loss of respect in the morning, and apprehension at night, that put a heavy strain on the nervous system, and that associ- ate the exercise of this function, which should be the focus of all pleasant states of consciousness, with exquisitely painful emotions. These latter may rise to such strength as to even blight not only the prospects but the fruition of wedlock, and plant misery in the center of the garden of joy, bringing impo- tence, temporary and perhaps permanent, to natures that would otherwise be healthful.
SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT 459 It is in this state of mind that youth most needs father, pastor, mentor, or mature friend. He shrinks from the doctor, for that means fuller revelation, examination or full detection, but he seeks one who understands his trouble from afar, knows his symptoms in advance, has met many such cases, and will give him not general hygienic, religious or moral advice, but specific and especially material help. Doses and even appli- ances appeal to just his age, and so youth falls into the cunning web spread so alluringly for his unwary feet across the ways he most frequents. Lancaster ^ found a single New York broker who had 3,000,000 confidential letters written to ad- vertising medical companies and doctors mostly by youth with their heart's blood and under assurances of secrecy, which are sold at fixed syndicate prices. I have bought 1,000 of them, and estimate that I could purchase at least 7,000,000 if I wished to go into this business, by addressing correspondence patients who had left other practitioners in this field discour- aged but who were ready to try one more. That some try a fifth is shown by the fact that the stated price per thousand letters, guaranteed to have been sold but four times, is $5. In these announcements the young man finds his every symptom and experience, and many more enumerated and described.
When the soul has entered upon this gloomy pathway to Avernus, everything seems to help it onward and downward. The fact that these organs are so much in his consciousness greatly stimulates their activity on the principle that ubi stimulus ibi afHuxus. In every part attended to, blood gathers, as all plethysmograph experiments show, and to these parts most of all. A mass of symptoms, half real and half imag- ined, accumulates and slowly becomes organized into a body of delusions. Ignorant of the wide range of normal vari- ations in the male, boys observe themselves, sometimes very consciously and methodically, even with mirrors, worry over every peculiarity of size, direction, shape, unequal pendency of testes, laxity of the scrotum, position of the prepuce, crook or twist, bilateral asymmetry, shade and color, change of vascularity, and become anxious urinoscopists, and the first » Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence. Ped. Sem., July, 1897, vol. v.
460 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Spontaneous discharge produces psychic perturbations that are entirely unnatural and often wild. Cases of the slight vari- cocele, not uncommon, especially on the left side at this age, are often thought to be a product of vice and excessive functions, with which, in fact, it has no more to do than has the texture of the hair. Youth strongly desires to be sound and natural sex- ually. The changes normal at this age attract attention in all, and in those of unstable temperament and heredity the new con- sciousness centering in sex has many symptoms which are often brooded over very secretly and affect profoundly the whole tone of mind and body. His case is graver than he had fancied, but however serious, there is hope and, better yet, sure relief. He is told (and here I follow circulars of what are to-day the lead- ing firms in this line) that if he is irritable, discouraged, fears his manhood is lost or imperiled, has bad dreams, or unreliable memory, pimples, blotches, is easily fatigued, is bashful in the presence of the other sex, has lascivious thoughts, fancies, etc., symptoms some of which are inseparable from this time of life, his intellectual fabric is in jeopardy. A white deposit is com- monly found in the urine, which is partly a normal secretion of the kidneys and partly mucus discharged as constantly from the walls of the bladder as from the inner nasal or abdominal cavities. This, the quack labels a sign of premature decay. The coil of tubes of the epididymis is easily observable, and this is the seat of the inflammatory process of varicocele, and the subtlety with which these practitioners draw attention to what would often be unnoticed and describe it as morbid, is one of the many grave, moral indictments against them. Is one of the testes lower or larger than the other; are they pendant or tense, of different tint from that of the limbs; is the prepuce long, short, retracted, or covering the glans; is there a twist in the urinal stream; is the organ small, too flaccid, turgescent or oblique, curved or twisted; is there pruritus, moisture or dry- ness; are veins visible; is there peristaltic movement, a sense of heat or cold — all these are lurid danger signals, and there is no time to lose. Their victims are often told that emissions occur