Psychopathia Sexualis With Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-legal Study

The propagation of the human species is not committed to accident or to the caprice of the individual, but made secure in a natural instinct, which, with all-conquering force and might, demands fulfillment. In the gratification of this natural impulse are found not only sensual pleasure and sources of physical well-being, but also higher feelings of satisfaction in perpetuating the single, perishable existence, by the transmission of mental and physical attributes to a new being. In coarse, sensual love, in the lustful impulse to satisfy this natural instinct, man stands on a level with the animal; but it is given to him to raise himself to a height where this natural instinct no longer makes him a slave: higher, nobler feelings are awakened, which, notwithstanding their sensual origin, expand into a world of beauty, sublimity, and morality. On this height man overcomes his natural instinct, and from an inexhaustible spring draws material and inspiration for higher enjoyment, for more earnest work, and the attainment of the ideal. Maudsley (Deutsche Klinik, 1873, 2, 3) rightly calls the sexual feeling the foundation for the development of the social feeling. "Were man to be robbed of the instinct of procreation and all that arises from it mentally, nearly all poetry and, perhaps, the entire moral sense as well, would be torn from his life." Sexuality is the most powerful factor in individual and social existence; the strongest incentive to the exertion of strength and acquisition of property, to the foundation of a home, and to the awakening of altruistic feelings, first for a person of the opposite sex, then for the offspring, and, in a wider sense, for all humanity. Thus all ethics and, perhaps, a good part of æsthetics and religion depend upon the existence of sexual feeling. Though the sexual life leads to the highest virtues, even to the sacrifice of the ego, yet in its sensual force lies also the danger that it may degenerate into powerful passions and develop the grossest vices. Love as an unbridled passion is like a fire that burns and consumes everything; like an abyss that swallows all,honor, fortune, well-being. It seems of high psychological interest to trace the developmental phases through which, in the course of the evolution of human culture to the morality and civilization of to-day, the sexual life has passed. On primitive ground the satisfaction of the sexual appetite of man seems like that of the animal. Openness in the sexual act is not shunned; man and woman are not ashamed to go naked. To-day we see savages in this condition (comp. Ploss, "Das Weib," p. 196, 1884); as, for example, the Australians, the Polynesians, and the Malays of the Philippines. The female is the common property of the males, the temporary booty of the strongest, who strive for the possession of the most beautiful of the opposite sex, thus carrying out instinctively a kind of sexual selection.

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