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Active flagellation or passive flagellation are, in exactly the same way, manifestations of erotic symbolism, the imaginative mimicry of coitus. Binet and also Krafft-Ebing have argued in effect that the whole of sexual selection is a matter of fetichism, that is to say, of erotic symbolism of object. "Normal love," Binet states, "appears as the result of a complicated fetichism."
This is something which the scientific authors have so far as good as completely overlooked, even where it has forced itself into view, as in a series of cases cited by Krafft-Ebing. We shall hear, in discussing the works of the poets, that they and the folk place this very motive before all others, indeed often take it as the only one.
Krafft-Ebing and other psychopathologists describe very abnormal cases of erotic fetishism in which some inanimate object becomes entirely dissociated from the person with whom it was originally connected, so that it serves exclusively as a love object in itself, and prevents a normal emotional reaction to members of the opposite sex.
This class falls into two divisions: one in which the individual is fairly normal, but belongs to a low grade of culture; the other in which he may belong to a more refined social class, but is affected by a deep degree of degeneration. In the first case we may properly apply the term bestiality; in the second case it may perhaps be better to use the term zooerastia, proposed by Krafft-Ebing.
A further degree of perversion in this direction is reached in a case of erotic zoophilia, recorded by Krafft-Ebing.
Cf. with this Krafft-Ebing, l.
Archivio di Psichiatria, 1902, fasc. ii-iii, p. 338. In the case of pathological sexuality in a boy of 15, reported by A. MacDonald, and already summarized, the sight of copulating flies is also mentioned among many other causes of sexual excitation. Krafft-Ebing presents or quotes typical cases of all these fetiches, Op. cit., pp. 255-266.
Other authors prefer the narrower term algolagnia which emphasizes the pleasure in pain and cruelty, whereas the terms selected by v. Krafft-Ebing place the pleasure secured in all kinds of humility and submission in the foreground. The roots of active algolagnia, sadism, can be readily demonstrable in the normal.
Krafft-Ebing divides exhibitionists into four clinical groups: acquired states of mental weakness, with cerebral or spinal disease clouding consciousness and at the same time causing impotence; epileptics, in whom the act is an abnormal organic impulse performed in a state of imperfect consciousness; a somewhat allied group of neurasthenic cases; periodical impulsive cases with deep hereditary taint.
Cited by Havelock Ellis, Psychology of Sex, pp. 233-4. Conduct and its Disorders, pp. 368-9. Psychopathia-Sexualis, pp. 9-11. Lost and Hostile Gospels, Preface. Cited by James, Varieties, pp. 345-6. Inge, Christian Mysticism, pp. 201-9. See Ellis, Psychology of Sex, pp. 240-2. Parkman's Jesuits in North America, p. 175. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia-Sexualis, p. 8.
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