Page:Homo-sexual Life by William John Fielding (1925).pdf/52

 In a series of several hundred cases which have been recognized in a period of half a dozen years, most of the cases recovered. The occurrence of panic, later, among men who secretly re-enlisted in some branch of the government's service and were returned to the hospital, as well as the return several years later of men who had profoundly deteriorated after having been discharged as social recoveries, shows that the recurrence of panic results from inability to control the tendency to become perverse, that is, biologically abnormal. "This abortive tendency seems eventually to become dominant and incurable."

Krafft-Ebing, already referred to, has described the peculiar sexual feeling of the invert as a functional sign of degeneration, and as a partial manifestation of a neuro-(psycho-) pathic state, in most cases (he believed) heriditary. He has catalogued the following characteristics as signs of this disorder:

1. The sexual life of individuals thus organized manifests itself, as a rule, abnormally early, and thereafter with abnormal power. Not infrequently still other perverse manifestations are presented besides the abnormal method of sexual satisfaction, which in itself is conditioned by the peculiar sexual feeling.

2. The psychical love manifest in these men is, for the most part, exaggered and exalted in the same way as their sexual instinct is manifested in consciousness, with a strange and even compelling force.