Page:Symonds - A Problem in Modern Ethics.djvu/67

Rh called by him "Psychical Hermaphrodites." Born with a predominant inclination towards persons of their own sex, they possess rudimentary feelings of a semi-sexual nature for the opposite. These people not unfrequently marry; and Krafft-Ebing supposes that many cases of frigidity in matrimony, unhappy unions, and so forth, are attributable to the peculiar diathesis of the male—or it may be, of the female—in these marriages. They are distinguished from his previous class of "acquired" inversion by the fact that the latter start with instincts for the other sex, which are gradually obliterated; whereas the psychical hermaphrodites commence life with an attraction towards their own sex, which they attempt to overcome by making demands upon their rudimentary normal instincts. Five cases are given of such persons.

In the next place he comes to true homosexual individuals, or Urnings in the strict sense of that phrase. With them there is no rudimentary appetite for the other sex apparent. They present a "grotesque" parallel to normal men and women, inverting or caricaturing natural appetites. The male of this class shrinks from the female, and the female from the male.