Page:Psychopathia Sexualis (tr. Chaddock, 1892).djvu/126

108 great impression on me. I should like to have faith in a cure, in a logical cure, so to speak, in accordance with the motto: “Tout comprendre c’est tout guérir.” (To understand all is to cure all.)

Of course the word cure is to be taken with some limitation, and there must be a distinction made between general feelings and concrete ideas. The former can never be overcome; they come like a stroke of lightning, are there, and one does not know whence or how.

But this practice of masochism in imagination, by means of concrete, associated ideas, can be avoided, or at least restricted.

Now the thing is changed. I say to myself: What! you busy your mind with things which not only the æsthetic sense of others, but also your own, disapproves? You regard that as beautiful and desirable which, in your own judgment, is at once ugly, coarse, silly, and impossible? You long for a situation which in reality you can never obtain? This opposing idea has an immediate inhibitory and undeceiving effect, and takes the edge off the fancy. Too, since reading the “New Investigations” (early this year), I have actually not reveled in my fancy once, though the masochistic tendency has occurred with regularity.

I must also confess that, in spite of its marked pathological character, masochism is not only incapable of destroying my pleasure in life, but it does not in the least affect my outward life. When not in a masochistic state, as far as feeling and action are concerned, I am a perfectly normal man. During the activity of the masochistic tendencies there is, of course, a great revolution in my feeling, but my outward manner of life suffers no change; I have a calling that makes it necessary for me to move much in public, and I pursue it in the masochistic condition as well as ever.

The author of the foregoing lines also sends me the following notes:—

1. Masochism, according to my experience, is, under all circumstances, congenital, and never acquired by the individual. I know positively that I was never spanked; that my masochistic ideas were manifested from my earliest youth; and that, as long as I have been capable of thinking, I have had such thoughts. If the origin of them had been the result of a particular event, especially of a beating, I should certainly not have forgotten it. It is characteristic that the ideas were present before there was any libido. At that time the ideas were absolutely sexless. I remember that, when a boy, it affected (not to say excited) me intensely when an older boy addressed me in the second person (Du), while I spoke to him in the third (Sie). I would keep up a conversation with him, and have the exchange of address take place as often as possible. Later, when I had become more mature sexually, such