In a case that has been reported to me, somewhat similar ideas played a part. The subject is a tall, well-developed man, aged 28, delicate in childhood, but now normal in health and physical condition, though not fond of athletics. His mental ability is much above the average, especially in scientific directions; he was brought up in narrow and strict religious views, but at an early age developed agnostic views of his own.
From the age of 6, and perhaps earlier, he practised masturbation almost every night. This was a habit which he carried on in all innocence. It was as invariable a preliminary, he states, to going to sleep as was lying down, and at this period he would have felt no hesitation in telling all about it had the question been asked. At the age of 12 or 13 he recognized the habit as abnormal, and fear of ridicule then caused him to keep silence and to avoid observation. In carrying it out he would lie on his stomach with the penis directed downward, and not up, and the thumb resting on the region above the root of the penis. There was desire for micturition after the act, and when that was satisfied sound sleep followed. When he realized that the habit was abnormal he began to make efforts to discontinue it, and these efforts have been continued up to the present. The chief obstacle has been the difficulty of sleep without carrying out the practice. Emissions first began to occur at the age of 13 and at first caused some alarm. During the six following years indulgence was irregular, sometimes occurring every other night and sometimes with a week's intermission. Then at the age of 19 the habit was broken for a year, during which nocturnal emissions took place during sleep about every three weeks. Since this, shorter periods of non-indulgence have occurred, these periods always coinciding with unusual mental or physical strain, as of examinations. He has some degree of attraction for women; this is strongest during cessation from masturbation and tends to disappear when the habit is resumed. He has never had sexual intercourse because he prefers his own method of gratification and feels great abhorrence for professional prostitutes; he could not afford to marry. Any indecency or immorality, except (he observes) his own variety, disgusts him.
At the earliest period no mental images accompanied the act of masturbation. At about the age of 8, however, sexual excitement began to be constantly associated with ideas of being whipped. At or soon after this age only the fear of disgrace prevented him from committing serious childish offenses likely to be punished by a good whipping. Parents and masters, however, seem to have used corporal punishment very sparingly.
At first this desire was for whipping in general, without reference to the operator. Soon after the age of 10, however, he began to wish that certain boy friends should be the operators. At about the same time definite desire arose for closer contact with these friends and later for definite indecent acts which, however, the subject failed to specify; he probably meant mutual masturbation. These desires were under control, and the fear of ridicule seems to have been the chief restraining cause. At about the age of 15 he began to realize that such acts might be considered morally bad and wrong, and this led to reticence and careful concealment. Up to the age of 20 there were four definite attachments to persons of his own sex. There was a tendency, sometimes, to regard women as possible whippers, and this became stronger at 22, the images of the two sexes then mingling in his thoughts of flagellation. Latterly the mental accompaniments of masturbation have been less personal, lapsing into the mental picture of being whipped by an unknown and vague somebody. When definite it has always been a man, and preferably of the type of a schoolmaster. His desire has been for punishment by whips, canes, or birches, especially upon the buttocks. He has always shrunk from the thought of the production of blood or bruises. He wishes, in mental contemplation, for a punishment sufficiently severe to make him anxious to stop it, and yet not able to stop it. He also takes pleasure in the idea of being tied up so as to be unable to move.
He has at times indulged in self-whipping, of no great severity.
In the preceding case we see a tendency to erotic self-flagellation which in a minor degree is not uncommon. Occasionally it becomes highly developed. Max Marcuse has presented such a case in elaborate detail (Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Neurologie, 1912, ht. 3, fully summarized in Sexual-Probleme, Nov., 1912, pp. 815-820). This is the case of a Catholic priest of highly neurotic heredity, who spontaneously began to whip himself at the age of 12, this self-flagellation being continued and accompanied by masturbation after the age of 15. Other associated perversions were Narcissism and nates fetichism, as well as homosexual phantasies. He experienced a certain pleasure (with erection, not ejaculation) in punishing his boy pupils. It is not uncommon for all forms of erotic flagellation to be associated with a homosexual element. I have elsewhere brought forward a case of this kind (the case of A. F., vol. ii of these Studies).
Significant is Rousseau's account of the origin of his own masochistic pleasure in whipping at the age of 8: "Mademoiselle Lambercier showed toward me a mother's affection and also a mother's authority, which she sometimes carried so far as to inflict on us the usual punishment of children when we had deserved it. For a long time she was content with the threat, and that threat of a chastisement which for me was quite new seemed very terrible; but after it had been executed I found the experience less terrible than the expectation had been; and, strangely enough, this punishment increased my affection for her who had inflicted it. It needed all my affection and all my natural gentleness to prevent me from seeking a renewal of the same treatment by deserving it, for I had found in the pain and even in the shame of it an element of sensuality which left more desire than fear of receiving the experience again from the same hand. It is true that, as in all this a precocious sexual element was doubtless mixed, the same chastisement if inflicted by her brother would not have seemed so pleasant." He goes on to say that the punishment was inflicted a second time, but that that time was the last, Mademoiselle Lambercier having apparently noted the effects it produced, and, henceforth, instead of sleeping in her room, he was placed in another room and treated by her as a big boy. "Who would have believed," he adds, "that this childish punishment, received at the age of 8 from the hand of a young woman of 30, would have determined my tastes, my desires, my passions, for the rest of my life?" He remarks that this strange taste drove him almost to madness, but maintained the purity of his morals, and the joys of love existed for him chiefly in imagination. (J. J. Rousseau, Les Confessions, partie i, livre i.) It will be seen how all the favoring conditions of fear, shame, and precocious sexuality were here present in an extremely sensitive child destined to become the greatest emotional force of his century, and receptive to influences which would have had no permanent effect on any ordinary child. (When, as occasionally happens, the first sexual feelings are experienced under the stimulation of whipping in normal children, no permanent perversion necessarily follows; Moll mentions that he knows such cases, Zeitschrift für Pädagogie, Psychiatrie, und Pathologie, 1901.) It may be added that it is, perhaps, not fanciful to see a certain inevitableness in the fact that on Rousseau's highly sensitive and receptive temperament it was a masochistic germ that fell and fructified, while on Régis's subject, with his more impulsive ancestral antecedents, a sadistic germ found favorable soil.
It may be noted that in Régis's sadistic case the little girl who was the boy's playmate found scarcely less pleasure in the passive part of whipping than he found in the active. There is ample evidence to show that this is very often the case, and that the attractiveness of the idea of being whipped often even arises spontaneously in children. Lombroso (La Donna Delinquente, p. 404) refers to a girl of 7 who had voluptuous pleasure in being whipped, and Hammer (Monatschrift für Harnkrankheiten, 1906, p. 398) speaks of a young girl who similarly experienced pleasure in punishment by whipping. Krafft-Ebing records the case of a girl of between 6 and 8 years of age, never at that time having been whipped or seen anyone else whipped, who spontaneously acquired—how she did not know—the desire to be castigated in this manner. It gave her very great pleasure to imagine a woman friend doing this to her. She never desired to be whipped by a man, though there was no trace of inversion, and she never masturbated until the age of 24, when a marriage engagement was broken off. At the age of 10 this longing passed away before it was ever actually realized. (Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, eighth edition, p. 136.)
In the case of another young woman described by Krafft-Ebing—where there was neurasthenia with other minor morbid conditions in the family, but the girl herself appears to have been sound—the desire to be whipped existed from a very early age. She traced it to the fact that when she was 5 years old a friend of her father's playfully placed her across his knees and pretended to whip her. Since then she has always longed to be caned, but to her great regret the wish has never been realized. She longs to be the slave of a man whom she loves: "Lying in fancy before him, he puts one foot on my neck while I kiss the other. I revel in the idea of being whipped by him and imagine different scenes in which he beats me. I take the blows as so many tokens of love; he is at first extremely kind and tender, but then in the excess of his love he beats me. I fancy that to beat me for love's sake gives him the highest pleasure." Sometimes she imagines that she is his slave, but not his female slave, for every woman may be her husband's slave. She is of proud and independent nature in all other matters, and to imagine herself a man who consents to be a slave gives her a more satisfying sense of humiliation. She does not understand that these manifestations are of a sexual nature. (Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, English translation of tenth edition, p. 189.)
Sometimes a woman desires to take the active part in whipping. Thus Marandon de Montyel records the case of a girl of 19, hereditarily neuropathic (her father was alcoholic), but very intelligent and good-hearted, who had never been whipped or seen anyone whipped. At this age, however, she happened to visit a married friend who was just about to punish her boy of 9 by whipping him with a wet towel. The girl spectator was much interested, and though the boy screamed and struggled she experienced a new sensation she could not define. "At every stroke," she said, "a strange shiver went through all my body from my brain to my heels." She would like to have whipped him herself and felt sorry when it was over. She could not forget the scene and would dream of herself whipping a boy. At last the desire became irresistible and she persuaded a boy of 12, whom she was very fond of, and who was much attached to her, to let her whip him on the naked nates. She did this so ferociously that he at last fainted. She was overcome by grief and remorse. (Marandon de Montyel, Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Jan., 1906, p. 30.)