Page:Psychopathia Sexualis (tr. Chaddock, 1892).djvu/251

Rh itself, and, according to the opinion of the patient, its promptings have been abnormally intense all her life. The first feelings and impulses were decidedly inverted. She conceived a passionate but platonic love for a young lady. She wrote verses and sonnets to her, and was perfectly happy if she could admire “the entrancing charms” of her goddess in the bath, or steal a glimpse of her neck, shoulders, and breast while she was dressing. The wild impulse to touch these physical charms was always overcome. While a young girl, she had actually been in love with Madonnas of Raphael and Guido Reni. In all kinds of weather she would run after pretty girls and ladies for hours at a time, admiring their beauty, losing no opportunity to please them, offering them bouquets, etc. The patient asserted that, until the age of nineteen, she was absolutely without a suspicion of a difference of sex; because she had been educated as in a cloister by a very prudish aunt, who was an old maid. Asa result of this great ignorance, the patient became the victim of a man who was passionately in love with her, and who had coitus with her by means of stratagem. She became the wife of this man, bore one child, and lived an “eccentric” sexual life with him. She felt perfectly satisfied with married intercourse. After a few years she became a widow. Since then, women have again been the object of her love, primarily, as the patient thinks, from fear of the results of sexual intercourse with a man.

At twenty-seven, second marriage, without love, to a phthisical husband. Patient was three times confined, and fulfilled her maternal duties. Her physical health failed, and in the later years of this married life she had an increasing aversion for her husband, partly due to a sense of his disease, though, at the same time, there was constantly present an intense desire for sexual indulgence.

Three years after the death of her second husband, the patient discovered the fact that her nine-year-old daughter, by her first husband, was given to masturbation, and that she was failing in physical health. The patient read of this vice, and could not overcome the impulse to indulge in the practice, becoming, in consequence, an onanist. She is unable to bring herself to give the details of this period of her life. She says that she was frightfully excited sexually, and had to send her daughters from home to save them from terrible consequences; but the two boys she was able to keep at home.

Patient became neurasthenic ex masturbatione (spinal irritation, feeling of pressure in head, weariness, lack of mental control), and, at times, had dysthymia and painful tædium vitæ. Her sexual feeling would be directed at one time to women, at another to men. She was able to restrain herself, and suffered much from abstinence, especially because, on account of her neurasthenic troubles, she sought to obtain relief in masturbation, though only in case of great necessity. At the present time, though forty-four years old, and menstruating regularly,