man, neither sadistic nor masochistic in his tendencies, when sitting looking out of his window saw a spider come out of its hole to capture and infold a fly which had just been caught in its web; as he watched the process he became conscious of a powerful erection, an occurrence which had never taken place under such circumstances before.[131] Under favoring conditions some incident of this kind at an early age may exert a decisive influence on the sexual life. Tambroni, of Ferrara, records the case of a boy of 11 who first felt voluptuous emotions on seeing in an illustrated journal the picture of a man trampling on his daughter; ever afterward he was obliged to evoke this image in masturbation or coitus.[132] An instructive case has been recorded by Féré. In this case a lady of neurotic heredity on one side, and herself liable to hysteria, experienced her first sexual crisis at the age of 13, not long after menstruation had become established, and when she had just recovered from an attack of chorea. Her old nurse, who had remained in the service of the family, had a ne'er-do-well son who had disappeared for some years and had just now suddenly returned and thrown himself, crying and sobbing, at the knees of his mother, who thrust him away. The young girl accidentally witnessed this scene. The cries and the sobs provoked in her a sexual excitement she had never experienced before. She rushed away in surprise to the next room, where, however, she could still hear the sobs, and soon she was overcome by a sexual orgasm. She was much troubled at this occurrence, and at the attraction which she now experienced for a man she had never seen before and whom she had always looked upon as a worthless vagabond. Shortly afterward she had an erotic dream concerning a man who sobbed at her knees. Later she again saw the nurse's son, but was agreeably surprised to find that, though a good-looking youth, he no longer caused her any emotion, and he disappeared from her mind, though the erotic dreams concerning an unknown sobbing man still occurred rather frequently. During the next ten years she suffered from various disorders of more or less hysterical character, and, although not disinclined to the idea of marriage, she refused all offers, for no man attracted her. At the age of 23, when staying in the Pyrenees, she made an excursion into Spain, and was present at a bull-fight. She was greatly excited by the charges of the bull, especially when the charge was suddenly arrested.[133] She felt no interest in any of the men who took part in the performance or were present; no man was occupying her imagination. But she experienced sexual sensations and accompanying general exhilaration, which were highly agreeable. After one bull had charged successively several times the orgasm took place. She considered the whole performance barbarous, but could not resist the desire to be present at subsequent bull-fights, a desire several times gratified, always with the same results, which were often afterward repeated in dreams. From that time she began to take an interest in horse-races, which she now found produced the same effect, though not to the same degree, especially when there was a fall. She subsequently married, but never experienced sexual satisfaction except under these abnormal circumstances or in dreams.[134] As the foregoing case indicates, horses, and especially running or struggling horses, sometimes have the same effect in stimulating the sexual emotions, especially on persons predisposed by neurotic heredity, as we have found that the spectacle of pain possesses. A medical correspondent in New Zealand tells me of a patient of his own, a young carpenter of 26, not in good health, who had never masturbated or had connection with a woman. He lived in a room overlooking a livery-stable yard where was kept, among other animals, a large black horse. Nearly every night he had a dream in which he seemed to be pursuing this large black horse, and when he caught it, which he invariably did, there was a copious emission. A holiday in the country and tonic treatment dispelled the dreams and reduced the nocturnal emissions to normal frequency. Féré has recorded a case of a boy, of neuropathic heredity, who, when 14 years of age, was one day about to practise mutual masturbation with another boy of his own age. They were seated on a hillside overlooking a steep road, and at this moment a heavy wagon came up the road drawn by four horses, which struggled painfully up, encouraged by the cries and the whip of the driver. This sight increased the boy's sexual excitement, which reached its climax when one of the horses suddenly fell. He had never before experienced such intense excitement, and always afterward a similar spectacle of struggling horses produced a similar effect.[135] In this connection reference may be made to the frequency with which dreams of struggling horses occur in connection with disturbance or disease of the heart. In such cases it is clear that the struggling horses seem to dream-consciousness to embody and explain the panting struggles to which the heart is subjected. They become, as it were, a visual symbol of the cardiac oppression. In much the same way, it would appear, under the influence of sexual excitement, in which cardiac disturbance is one of the chief constituent elements, the struggling horses became a sexual symbol, and, having attained that position, they are henceforth alone adequate to produce sexual excitement.
FOOTNOTES: [128] This opinion appears to be in harmony with the conclusions of Eulenburg, who has devoted special study to De Sade, and points out that the ordinary conception of "sadism" is much too narrow. (Eulenburg, _Sexuale Neuropathie_, 1895, p. 110 et seq.)
[129] Casanova, _Mémoires_, vol. viii, pp. 74-76. Goncourt in his _Journal_, under date of April, 1862 (vol. ii, p. 27), tells a story of an Englishman who engaged a room overlooking a scaffold where a murderer was to be hanged, proposing to take a woman with him and to avail himself of the excitement aroused by the scene. This scheme was frustrated by the remission of the death penalty.
[131] This spectacle of the spider and the fly seems indeed to be specially apt to exert a sexual influence. I have heard of a precisely similar case in a man of intellectual distinction, and another in a lady who acknowledged to a feeling of "exquisite pleasure," on one occasion, at the mere sound of the death agony of a fly in a spider's web.
[132] Quoted by Obici and Marchesini, _Le Amicizie di Collegio_, p. 245.
[133] It may be noted that we have already several times encountered this increase of excitement produced by arrest of movement. The effect is produced whether the arrest is witnessed or is actually experienced. "A man can increase a woman's excitement," a lady writes, "by forbidding her to respond in any way to his caresses. It is impossible to remain quite passive for more than a few seconds, but, during these few, excitement is considerably augmented." In a similar way I have been told of a man of brilliant intellectual ability who very seldom has connection with a woman without getting her to compress with her hand the base of the urethral canal to such an extent as to impede the passage of the semen. On withdrawal of the hand copious emission occurs, but it is the shock of the arrest caused by the constriction which gives him supreme pleasure. He has practised this method for years without evil results.
[134] Féré, "Le Sadisme aux Courses de Taureaux," _Revue de médecine_, August, 1900.
VI.
Why is Pain a Sexual Stimulant?--It is the Most Effective Method of Arousing Emotion--Anger and Fear the Most Powerful Emotions--Their Biological Significance in Courtship--Their General and Special Effects in Stimulating the Organism--Grief as a Sexual Stimulant--The Physiological Mechanism of Fatigue Renders Pain Pleasurable.
We have seen that the distinction between "sadism" and "masochism" cannot be maintained; not only was even De Sade himself something of a masochist and Sacher-Masoch something of a sadist, but between these two extreme groups of phenomena there is a central group in which the algolagnia is neither active nor passive. "Sadism" and "masochism" are simply convenient clinical terms for classes of manifestations which quite commonly occur in the same person. We have further found that--as might have been anticipated in view of the foregoing result--it is scarcely correct to use the word "cruelty" in connection with the phenomena we have been considering. The persons who experience these impulses usually show no love of cruelty outside the sphere of sexual emotion; they may even be very intolerant of cruelty. Even when their sexual impulses come into play they may still desire to secure the pleasure of the persons who arouse their sexual emotions, even though it may not be often true that those who desire to inflict pain at these moments identify themselves with the feelings of those on whom they inflict it. We have thus seen that when we take a comprehensive survey of all these phenomena a somewhat general formula will alone cover them. Our conclusion so far must be that under certain abnormal circumstances pain, more especially the mental representation of pain, acts as a powerful sexual stimulant.
The reader, however, who has followed the discussion to this point will be prepared to take the next and final step in our discussion and to reach a more definite conclusion. The question naturally arises: By what process does pain or its mental representation thus act as a sexual stimulant? The answer has over and over again been suggested by the facts brought forward in this study. Pain acts as a sexual stimulant because it is the most powerful of all methods for arousing emotion.
The two emotions most intimately associated with pain are anger and fear. The more masculine and sthenic emotion of anger, the more passive and asthenic emotion of fear, are the fundamental animal emotions through which, on the psychic side, the process of natural selection largely works. Every animal in some degree owes its survival to the emotional reaction of anger against weaker rivals, to the emotional reaction of fear against stronger rivals. To this cause we owe it that these two emotions are so powerfully and deeply rooted in the whole zoölogical series to which we belong. But anger and fear are not less fundamental in the sexual life. Courtship on the male's part is largely a display of combativity, and even the very gestures by which the male seeks to appeal to the female are often those gestures of angry hostility by which he seeks to intimidate enemies. On the female's part courtship is a skillful manipulation of her own fears, and, as we have seen elsewhere, when studying the phenomena of modesty, that fundamental attitude of the female in courtship is nothing but an agglomeration of fears.
The biological significance of the emotions is now well recognized. "In general," remarks one of the shrewdest writers on animal psychology, "we may say that emotional states are, under natural conditions, closely associated with behavior of biological value--with tendencies that are beneficial in self-preservation and race preservation--with actions that promote survival, and especially with the behavior which clusters round the pairing and parental instincts. The value of the emotions in animals is that they are an indirect means of furthering survival." (Lloyd Morgan, _Animal Behavior_, p. 293.) Emotional aptitudes persist not only by virtue of the fact that they are still beneficial, but because they once were; that is to say, they may exist as survivals. In this connection I may quote from a suggestive paper on "Teasing and Bullying," by F.L. Burk; at the conclusion of this study, which is founded on a large body of data concerning American children, the author asks: "Accepting for the moment the theories of Spencer and Ribot upon the transmission of rudimentary instincts, is it possible that the movements which comprise the chief elements of bullying, teasing, and the egotistic impulses in general of the classes cited--pursuing, throwing down, punching, striking, throwing missiles, etc.--are, from the standpoint of consciousness, broken neurological fragments, which are parts of old chains of activity involved in the pursuit, combat, capture, torture, and killing of men and enemies?...Is not this hypothesis of transmitted fragments of instincts in accord with the strangely anomalous fact that children are at one moment seemingly cruel and at the next affectionate and kind, vibrating, as it were, between two worlds, egotistic and altruistic, without conscious sense of incongruity?" (F.L. Burk, "Teasing and Bullying," _Pedagogical Seminary_, April, 1897.)
The primitive connection of the special emotions of anger and fear with the sexual impulse has been well expressed by Colin Scott in his remarkable study of "Sex and Art": "If the higher forms of courting are based on combat, among the males at least anger must be intimately associated with love. And below both of these lies the possibility of fear. In combat the animal is defeated who is first afraid. Competitive exhibition of prowess will inspire the less able birds with a deterring fear. Young grouse and woodcock do not enter the lists with the older birds, and sing very quietly. It is the same with the very oldest birds. Audubon says that the old maids and bachelors of the Canada goose move off by themselves during the courting of the younger birds. In order to succeed in love, fear must be overcome in the male as well as in the female. Courage is the essential male virtue, love is its outcome and reward. The strutting, crowing, dancing, and singing of male birds and the preliminary movements generally of animals must gorge the neuromotor and muscular systems with blood and put them in better fighting trim. The effects of this upon the feelings of the animal himself must be very great. Hereditary tendencies swell his heart. He has 'the joy that warriors feel.' He becomes regardless of danger, and sometimes almost oblivious of his surroundings. This intense passionateness must react powerfully on the whole system, and more particularly on those parts which are capable, such as the brain, of using up a great surplus of blood, and on the naturally erethic functions of sex. The flood of anger or fighting instinct is drained off by the sexual desires, the antipathy of the female is overcome, and sexual union successfully ensues...Courting and combat shade into one another, courting tending to take the place of the more basal form of combat. The passions which thus come to be associated with love are those of fear and anger, both of which, by arousing the whole nature and stimulating the nutritive sources from which they flow, come to increase the force of the sexual passion to which they lead up and in which they culminate and are absorbed," (Colin Scott, "Sex and Art," _American Journal of Psychology_, vol. vii, No. 2, pp. 170 and 215.)
It must be remembered that fear is an element liable to arise in all courtship on one side or the other. It is usually on the side of the female, but not invariably. Among spiders, for instance, it is usually the male who feels fear, and very reasonably, for he is much weaker than the female. "Courtship by the male spider" says T.H. Montgomery ("The Courtship of Araneads," _American Naturalist_, March, 1910, p. 166), "results from a combination of the state of desire for and fear of the female." It is by his movements of fear that he advertises himself to the female as a male, and it is by the same movements that he is unconsciously impelled to display prominently his own ornamentation.
We are thus brought to those essential facts of primitive courtship with which we started. But we are now able to understand more clearly how it is that alien emotional states became abnormally associated with the sexual life. Normally the sexual impulse is sufficiently reinforced by the ordinary active energies of the organism which courtship itself arouses, energies which, while they may be ultimately in part founded on anger and fear, rarely allow these emotions to be otherwise than latent. Motion, it may be said, is more prominent than emotion.
Even normally a stimulant to emotional activities is pleasurable, just as motion itself is pleasurable. It may even be useful, as was noted long ago by Erasmus Darwin; he tells of a friend of his who, when painfully fatigued by riding, would call up ideas arousing indignation, and thus relieve the fatigue, the indignation, as Darwin pointed out, increasing muscular activity.[136] It is owing to this stimulating action that discomfort, even pain, may be welcomed on account of the emotional waves they call up, because they "lash into movement the dreary calm of the sea's soul," and produce that alternation of pain and enjoyment for which Faust longed. Groos, who recalls this passage in his very thorough and profound discussion of the region wherein tragedy has its psychological roots, points out that it is the overwhelming might of the storm itself, and not the peace of calm after the storm, which appeals to us. In the same way, he observes, even surprise and shock may also be pleasurable, and fear, though the most depressing of emotional states, by virtue of the joy produced by strong stimuli is felt as attractive; we not only experience an impulse of pleasure in dominating our environment, but also have pleasure in being dominated and rendered helpless by a higher power.[137] Hirn, again, in his work on the origins of art, has an interesting chapter on "The Enjoyment of Pain," a phenomenon which he explains by its resultant reactions in increase of outward activity, of motor excitement. Anger, he observes elsewhere, is "in its active stage a decidedly pleasurable emotion. Fear, which in its initial stage is paralyzing and depressing, often changes in time when the first shock has been relieved by motor reaction...Anger, fear, sorrow, notwithstanding their distinctly painful initial stage, are often not only not avoided, but even deliberately sought."[138] In the ordinary healthy organism, however, although the stimulants of strong emotion may be vaguely pleasurable, they do not have more than a general action on the sexual sphere, nor are they required for the due action of the sexual mechanism. But in a slightly abnormal organism--whether the anomaly is due to a congenital neuropathic condition, or to a possibly acquired neurasthenic condition, or merely to the physiological inadequacy of childhood or old age--the balance of nervous energy is less favorable for the adequate play of the ordinary energies in courtship. The sexual impulse is itself usually weaker, even when, as often happens, its irritability assumes the fallacious appearance of strength. It has become unusually sensitive to unusual stimuli and also, it is possible,--perhaps as a result of those conditions,--more liable to atavistic manifestations. An organism in this state becomes peculiarly apt to seize on the automatic sources of energy generated by emotion. The parched sexual instinct greedily drinks up and absorbs the force it obtains by applying abnormal stimuli to its emotional apparatus. It becomes largely, if not solely, dependent on the energy thus secured. The abnormal organism in this respect may become as dependent on anger or fear, and for the same reason, as in other respects it may become dependent on alcohol.
We see the process very well illustrated by the occasional action of the emotion of anger. In animals the connection between love and anger is so close that even normally, as Groos points out, in some birds the sight of an enemy may call out the gestures of courtship.[139] As Krafft-Ebing remarks, both love and anger "seek their object, try to possess themselves of it, and naturally exhaust themselves in a physical effect on it; both throw the psychomotor sphere into the most intense excitement, and by means of this excitement reach their normal expression."[140] Féré has well remarked that the impatience of desire may itself be regarded as a true state of anger, and Stanley Hall, in his admirable study of anger, notes that "erethism of the breasts or sexual parts" was among the physical manifestations of anger occurring in some of his cases, and in one case a seminal emission accompanied every violent outburst.[141] Thus it is that anger may be used to reinforce a weak sexual impulse, and cases have been recorded in which coitus could only be performed when the man had succeeded in working himself up into an artificial state of anger.[142] On the other hand, Féré has recorded a case in which the sexual excitement accompanying delayed orgasm was always transformed into anger, though without any true sadistic manifestations.[143] As a not unexpected complementary phenomenon to this connection of anger and sexual emotion in the male, it is sometimes found that the spectacle of masculine anger excites pleasurable emotion in women. The case has been recorded of a woman who delighted in arousing anger for the pleasure it gave her, and who advised another woman to follow her example and excite her husband's anger, as nothing was so enjoyable as to see a man in a fury of rage[144]; Lombroso mentions a woman who was mostly frigid, but experienced sexual feelings when she heard anyone swearing; and a medical friend tells me of a lady considerably past middle age who experienced sexual erethism after listening to a heated argument between her husband and a friend on religious topics. The case has also been recorded of a masochistic man who found sexual satisfaction in masturbating while a woman, by his instructions, addressed him in the lowest possible terms of abuse.[145] Such a feeling doubtless underlies that delight in teasing men which is so common among young women. Stanley Hall, referring to the almost morbid dread of witnessing manifestations of anger felt by many women, remarks: "In animals, females are often described as watching with complacency the conflict of rival males for their possession, and it seems probable that the intense horror of this state, which many females report, is associated more or less unconsciously with the sexual rage which has followed it."[146] The dread may well be felt at least as much as regards the emotional state in themselves as in the males.
Even when the emotion aroused is disgust it may still act as a sexual stimulant. Stcherbak has narrated the instructive case of a very intelligent and elegant married lady of rather delicate constitution, an artist of some talent, who never experienced any pleasure in sexual intercourse, but ever since sexual feelings first began to be manifested at all (at the age of 18) has only experienced them in relation to disgusting things. Anything that is repulsive, like vomit, etc., causes vague but pleasurable feelings which she gradually came to recognize as sexual. The sight of a crushed frog will cause very definite sexual sensations. She has had many admirers and she has observed that a declaration of love by a disagreeable or even repulsive man sexually excites her, though she has no desire for sexual intercourse with him.[147] After all that has gone before it is easy to see how the emotion of fear may act in an analogous manner to anger. Just as anger may reinforce the active forms of the sexual impulse to which it is allied, so fear may reinforce the passive forms of that impulse. The following observations, written by a lady, very well show how we may thus explain the sexual attractiveness of whipping: "The fascination of whipping, which has always greatly puzzled me, seems to be a sort of hankering after the stimulus of fear. In a wild state animals live in constant fear. In civilized life one but rarely feels it. A woman's pleasure in being afraid of a husband or lover may be an equivalent of a man's love of adventure; and the fear of children for their parents may be the dawning of the love of adventure. In a woman this desire of adventure receives a serious check when she begins to realize what she might be subjected to by a man if she gratified it. Excessive fear is demoralizing, but it seems to me that the idea of being whipped gives a sense of fear which is not excessive. It is almost the only kind of pain (physical) which is inflicted on children or women by persons whom they can love and trust, and with a moral object. Any other kind of bodily ill treatment suggests malignity and may rouse resentment, and, in extreme cases, an excess of fear which goes beyond the limits of pleasurable excitement. Given a hereditary feeling of this sort, I think it is helped by the want of actual experience, as the association with excitement is freed from the idea of pain as such." In his very valuable and suggestive study of fears, Stanley Hall, while recognizing the evil of excessive fear, has emphasized the emotional and even the intellectual benefits of fear, and the great part played by fear in the evolution of the race as "the rudimentary organ on the full development and subsequent reduction of which many of the best things in the soul are dependent." "Fears that paralyze some brains," he remarks, "are a good tonic for others. In some form and degree all need it always. Without the fear apparatus in us, what a wealth of motive would be lost!"[148] It is on the basis of this tonic influence of fear that in some morbidly sensitive natures fear acts as a sexual stimulant. Cullerre has brought together a number of cases in both men and women, mostly neurasthenic, in which fits of extreme anxiety and dread, sometimes of a religious character and often in highly moral people, terminate in spontaneous orgasm or in masturbation.[149] Professor Gurlitt mentions that his first full sexual emission took place in class at school, when he was absorbed in writing out the life of Aristides and very anxious lest he should not be able to complete it within the set time.[150] Dread and anxiety not only excite sexual emotion, but in the more extreme morbid cases they may suppress and replace it. Terror, say Fliess, is transmuted coitus, and Freud believes that the neurosis of anxiety always has a sexual cause, while Ballet, Capgras, Löwenfeld, and others, though not regarding a sexual traumatism as the only cause, still regard it as frequent.
It is worthy of note that not only fear, but even so depressing an emotion as grief, may act as a sexual stimulant, more especially in women. This fact is not sufficiently recognized, though probably everyone can recall instances from his personal knowledge, such cases being generally regarded as inexplicable. It is, however, not more surprising that grief should be transformed into sexual emotion than that (as in a case recorded by Stanley Hall) it should manifest itself as anger. In any case we have to bear in mind the frequency of this psychological transformation in the presence of cases which might otherwise seem to call for a cynical interpretation.
The case has been recorded of an English lady of good social position who fell in love with an undertaker at her father's funeral and insisted on marrying him. It is known that some men have been so abnormally excited by the funeral trappings of death that only in such surroundings have they been able to effect coitus. A case has been recorded of a physician of unimpeachable morality who was unable to attend funerals, even of his own relatives, on account of the sexual excitement thus aroused. Funerals, tragedies at the theater, pictures of martyrdom, scenes of execution, and trials at the law-courts have been grouped together as arousing pleasure in many people, especially women. (C.F. von Schlichtegroll, _Sacher-Masoch und der Masochismus_, pp. 30-31.) Wakes and similar festivals may here find their psychological basis, and funerals are an unquestionable source of enjoyment among some people, especially of so-called "Celtic" race. The stimulating reaction after funerals is well known to many, and Leigh Hunt refers to this (in his _Autobiography_) as affecting the sincerely devoted friends who had just cremated Shelley.
It may well be, as Kiernan has argued (_Alienist and Neurologist_, 1891; ibid., 1902, p. 263), that in the disturbance of emotional balance caused by grief the primitive instincts become peculiarly apt to respond to stimulus, and that in the aboulia of grief the mind is specially liable to become the prey to obsessions.
"When my child died at the age of 6 months," a correspondent writes, "I had a violent paroxysm of weeping and for some days I could not eat. When I kissed the dead boy for the last time (I had never seen a corpse before) I felt I had reached the depths of misery and could never smile or have any deep emotions again. Yet that night, though my thoughts had not strayed to sexual subjects since the child's death, I had a violent erection. I felt ashamed to desire carnal things when my dead child was still in the house, and explained to my wife. She was sympathetic, for her idea was that our common grief had intensified my love for her. I feel convinced, however, that my desire was the result of a stimulus propagated to the sexual centers from the centers affected by my grief, the transference of my emotion from one set of nerves to another. I do not perhaps express my meaning clearly."
How far the emotional influence of grief entered into the following episode it is impossible to say, for here it is probable that we are mainly concerned with one of those almost irresistible impulses by which adolescent girls are sometimes overcome. The narrative is from the lips of a reliable witness, a railway guard, who, some thirty years ago, when a youth of 18, in Cornwall, lodged with a man and woman who had a daughter of his own age. Some months later, when requiring a night's lodging, he called at the house, and was greeted warmly by the woman, who told him her husband had just died and that she and her daughter were very nervous and would be glad if he would stay the night, but that as the corpse occupied the other bedroom he would have to share their bed ("We don't think very much of that among us," my informant added). He agreed, and went to bed, and when, a little later, the two women also came to bed, the girl, at her own suggestion, lay next to the youth. Nothing happened during the night, but in the morning, when the mother went down to light the fire, the daughter immediately threw off the bedclothes, exposing her naked person, and before the youth had realized what was happening she had drawn him over on to her. He was so utterly surprised that nothing whatever happened, but the incident made a life-long impression on him.