United States or Afghanistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There can be no doubt that, more especially in highly intelligent children with vague and unspecialized yet insistent sexual impulses, the artificial mystery with which sex is too often clothed not only accentuates the natural curiosity but also tends to favor the morbid intensity and even prurience of the sexual impulse. This has long been recognized. Dr. Beddoes wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century: "It is in vain that we dissemble to ourselves the eagerness with which children of either sex seek to satisfy themselves concerning the conformation of the other. No degree of reserve in the heads of families, no contrivances, no care to put books of one description out of sight and to garble others, has perhaps, with any one set of children, succeeded in preventing or stifling this kind of curiosity. No part of the history of human thought would perhaps be more singular than the stratagems devised by young people in different situations to make themselves masters or witnesses of the secret. And every discovery, due to their own inquiries, can but be so much oil poured upon an imagination in flames" (T. Beddoes, Hygeia, 1802, vol. iii, p. 59). Kaan, again, in one of the earliest books on morbid sexuality, sets down mystery as one of the causes of psychopathia sexualis. Marro (La Pubert
Tapping had to have in him five actors and two actresses, and play all their seven parts as they came. Marvellous it was to see him do this; springing from place to place, and changing his whole aspect in a flash now scolding shrewishly in the words of Violet Hartman, now discoursing, with the accent and manner of Prof, von Arne, upon the psychopathia sexualis of Genius.
Various facts and references bearing on this subject are brought together by Blumenbach, Anthropological Memoirs, translated by Bendyshe, p. 80; Block, Beiträge zur Ætiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil II, pp. 276-283; also Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib, seventh edition, p. 520.
Kempf, E.J. The Tonus of the Autonomic Segments as Causes of Abnormal Behaviour. Jour. Nerv. & Ment. Disease, Jan., 1920, pp. 1-34. Krafft-Ebing, R. Psychopathia Sexualis. Fuchs, Stuttgart, 1907. Pavlov, J.P. L'excitation Psychique des Glandes Salivaires. Jour de Psychologie, 1910, No. 2, pp. 97-114. Watson, J.B. Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviourist. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1919.
Shoe-fetichism, more especially if we include under this term all the cases of real or pseudo-masochism in which an attraction to the boots or slippers is the chief feature, is a not infrequent phenomenon, and is certainly the most frequently occurring form of fetichism. Many cases are brought together by Krafft-Ebing in his Psychopathia Sexualis.
Bloch brings together many interesting references bearing on the ancient sexual and religious symbolism of the shoe, Beiträge zur Ætiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil II, p. 324. It is essentially a case of masochism, though manifesting itself almost exclusively in the desire to perform humiliating acts in connection with the attractive person's boots.
Instances of this widespread belief found among the Tamils of Ceylon as well as in Europe are quoted from various authors by Bloch, Beiträge zur Ætiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil II, p. 278, and Moll, Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis, bd. i, p. 700.
In a slight and germinal degree I believe that cases of fetichism are not uncommon in women, but they are certainly rare in a well-marked form, and Krafft-Ebing declared, even in the late editions of his Psychopathia Sexualis, that he knew of no cases in women. So far we have been concerned with the urolagnic rather than the coprolagnic variety of scatalogical symbolism.
Word Of The Day