Page:Psychopathia Sexualis (tr. Chaddock, 1892).djvu/184

166 companions. With advancing years, the fetich grew more and more powerful. Even false hair began to excite him, but he always preferred natural hair. When he could touch or kiss it, he was perfectly happy. He wrote essays and poems on the beauty of female hair; he sketched heads of hair and masturbated. After his fourteenth year he became so powerfully excited by his fetich that he had violent erections. In contrast with his early taste while a boy, he was now charmed only by luxuriant, thick black hair. He experienced intense desire to kiss such hair, particularly to suck it. To touch such hair afforded him but little satisfaction; he obtained much more pleasure in looking at it, but particularly in kissing and sucking it. If this were impossible, he would become unhappy, even to the extent of tædium vitæ. Then he would attempt to relieve himself, imagining fantastic “hair-adventures” and masturbating. Not infrequently, in the street and in crowds, he could not keep from imprinting a kiss on ladies’ heads. He would then hurry home to masturbate. Sometimes he could resist this impulse; but it was then necessary for him, filled with feelings of fear, to run away as quickly as possible, in order to escape the domination of his fetich. He was only once impelled to cut off a girl’s hair in a crowd. In the act he was seized with fear, and was not successful with his pocket-knife; and, by flight, he narrowly escaped detection.

When he became mature, he attempted to satisfy himself in coitus with puellis. He induced powerful erection by kissing the hair, but could not induce ejaculation. Therefore, he was unsatisfied by coitus. At the same time, his favorite idea was coitus with kissing of hair; but even this did not satisfy him, because it did not induce ejaculation. Faute de mieux, he once stole the combings of a lady’s hair, put it in his mouth, and masturbated while calling its owner up in imagination. In the dark a woman could not interest him, because he could not then see her hair. Flowing hair also had no charm for him; nor did the hair about the genitals. His erotic dreams were all about hair. Of late the patient had become so excited that he had a kind of satyriasis. He was incapable of business, and felt so unhappy that he sought to drown his sorrow in alcohol. He drank large quantities, had alcoholic delirium, an attack of alcoholic epilepsy, and required hospital treatment. After the intoxication had passed away, under appropriate treatment, the sexual excitement soon disappeared; and when the patient was discharged, he was freed from his fetichistic idea, save for its occasional occurrence in dreams. The physical examination showed normal genitals and no degenerative signs whatever.

Such cases of hair-fetichism, which lead to attacks on female hair, seem to occur everywhere, from time to time. In November, 1890, according to reports in American newspapers,