Page:Fielding - Sex and the Love Life.pdf/267

Rh selves in masturbation, we might quote Dr. A. A. Brill, the psychoanalytic authority: "The patients are terrified by reading quack literature, and, I regret to say, by uninformed doctors. They are threatened with paralysis, paresis, consumption of the spine, insanity, etc., and as a result they become depressed, hypochondriacal and self-conscious. But as soon as they become convinced that they are not doomed, and that masturbation cannot cause insanity or other dreadful maladies, they soon lose their symptoms. Nor must it be imagined that robbing masturbation of its terrors encourages the practice. On the contrary, I have found that as long as the patients dread it and struggle against it, they masturbate twice as often as when they become convinced that it has none of its supposed terrors."