Page:Psychopathia Sexualis (tr. Chaddock, 1892).djvu/74

56 despair at new scandals, placed her in an asylum. She lived there until May, 1858, when she died of apoplexia cerebri, in her seventy-third year. Her conduct in the asylum was exemplary. Left to herself, and under favorable conditions, her sexual impulses manifested themselves shortly before her death. With the exception of this, during an observation of four years by physicians of the asylum, she never showed a sign of mental abnormality.

In this condition there is perverse emotional coloring of the sexual ideas. Ideas physiologically and psychologically accompanied by feelings of disgust, give rise to pleasurable sexual feelings; and the abnormal association finds expression in passionate, uncontrollable emotion. The practical results are perverse acts (perversion of the sexual instinct). This is more easily the case if the pleasurable feelings, increased to passionate intensity, inhibit any opposing ideas with corresponding feelings of disgust; or the influence of such opposing concepts may be impossible on account of the absence or loss of all ideas of morality, æsthetics, and law. This loss, however, is only too frequently found where the spring of ethical ideas and feelings (a normal sexual instinct) has been poisoned from the beginning.

With opportunity for the natural satisfaction of the sexual instinct, every expression of it that does not correspond with the purpose of nature,—i.e., propagation,—must be regarded as perverse. The perverse sexual acts resulting from paræsthesia are of the greatest importance clinically, socially, and forensically; and, therefore, they must here receive careful consideration; all æsthetic and polite disgust must be overcome.

Perversion of the sexual instinct, as will be seen from what follows, is not to be confounded with perversity in the sexual act; since the latter may be induced by conditions which are not psychopathology. The concrete perverse act, monstrous as it may be, is not decisive. In order to differentiate between disease (perversion) and vice (perversity), one must investigate the whole personality of the individual and the original impulse