Page:Psychopathia Sexualis (tr. Chaddock, 1892).djvu/410

392 In 1884, exhibition before girls in a church-yard; again in 1885. He declared: "I understand my crime, but it is like a disease. When it comes over me, I cannot keep from such acts. It sometimes happens that, for quite a long time, I am free from these inclinations." Imprisonment for six months.

Discharged on August 12, 1885, he had a relapse on August 15. The same excuse was given. This time he underwent medical examination. The examination revealed no mental disturbance. Sentenced to three years. After discharge, a series of new exhibitions. On this occasion, examination revealed the following:—

His father suffered with chronic alcoholism, and is said to have been guilty of the same crime. Mother and sister nervously ill, and the whole family of excitable temperament.

From his seventh to his eighteenth year X. suffered with epileptic convulsions. First cohabitation at sixteen; later, gonorrhœa and, it is stated, syphilis. After that, normal sexual intercourse until his twenty-first year. At that time he often had to pass a play-ground, and he occasionally had to urinate there; and it happened that the children looked at him, out of curiosity.

He noticed, occasionally, that this looking at him caused him sexual excitement, and induced erection, and even ejaculation. He now found more pleasure in this kind of sexual gratification, and became indifferent about coitus, satisfying himself only in this manner. He felt that all his thought was ruled by this, and he dreamed only of exhibitions, with pollutions. His attempts to control his impulse became more and more ineffectual. It came over him with such force that he noticed nothing around him, and saw and heard nothing, and was like one "devoid of reason,"—like "a bull trying to butt his head through a wall."

X. has an abnormally broad head. Small penis; the left testicle deformed. Patellar reflex absent. Symptoms of neurasthenia, especially cerebral. Frequent pollutions. For the most part, his dreams are about normal coitus, only infrequently about exhibition before little girls.

With reference to his sexual acts, he states that the impulse to seek and approach little girls is primary; only when he has succeeded in attracting their attention to his exposed genitals do erection and ejaculation occur. He does not lose consciousness in the act. After it he is troubled about his deed, and, if undiscovered, says to himself, "Once more I have escaped the authorities."

In prison he did not have the impulse; there, he was troubled only with dreams and pollutions. In freedom he had daily sought opportunity to satisfy himself with exhibition. He would give ten years of his life to be free from the thing; "this life of constant anxiety, this alternation between freedom and imprisonment, is unendurable."

The opinion assumed a congenital (?) perversity of the sexual