Page:Psychopathia Sexualis (tr. Chaddock, 1892).djvu/149

Rh shoes for his pleasure. He calls this “sacrificing to the feet of Venus.” At other times he has the woman walk on him with her shoes on, the harder the better.

Until the last year it was sufficient—since he did not take the slightest sensual pleasure in women—to caress ladies’ shoes that pleased him, thus attaining ejaculation and complete satisfaction. (Lombroso, Archiv di Psichiatria, ix, fascic. iii.)

The following case reminds one of the third of this series, on account of the interest in the nails of the shoes (as capable of inflicting pain); and of the fourth. on account of the slight accompanying sadistic element:—

Case 64. X., aged 34, married; of neuropathic parentage; suffered severely from convulsions as a child; remarkably precocious, but one-sided in development (could read at age of three); nervous from childhood. At the age of seven he manifested an inclination to handle shoes, especially the nails of women’s shoes. The mere sight, but still more the touching, of the shoe-nails and counting them, gave him indescribable pleasure.

At night he gave himself up to imagining how his cousins had their measures taken for shoes; how he nailed horse-shoes on to one of them or cut her feet off. In time the shoe-scenes came upon him during the day, and involuntarily induced erection and ejaculation. Frequently he took the shoes of female occupants of the house; and if he touched them with his penis he had an ejaculation. For a long time, when a student, it was possible for him to control his ideas and inclinations; but there came a time when he was compelled to listen to female footsteps on the pavements, which, like the sight of the nail-marks in ladies’ shoes, or the sight of shoes in the windows of the shoe-shops, always gave him a feeling of lustful pleasure. He married, and during the first months of his married life was free from these desires.

Gradually he became hysteropathic and neurasthenic. At this stage he began to have hysterical attacks when the shoemaker spoke to him of nails in ladies’ shoes or of driving nails in the same. The reaction was still greater if he chanced to see a pretty lady with shoes well beset with nails. In order to induce ejaculation it was only necessary for him to cut soles out of pasteboard and beset them with nails; or he would buy ladies’ shoes, have them beset with nails in the store, and at home scrape them on the ground, and finally touch the end of his penis with them. Moreover, lustful shoe-visions occurred spontaneously, in which he satisfied himself by masturbation.

X. is otherwise intelligent, skillful in his calling, but powerless in combating his perverse inclinations. He presents phimosis; penis short, expanded at the root, and incapable of complete erection. One day the