The following case shows that European women sometimes demand artificial changes in the male genital organs, in order to increase their voluptuous sensations. Some years ago a man, fifty years of age, was admitted into the syphilis wards of the Laibacher Hospital. The discharge from the penis was, however, found to be due merely to balanitis. On examination the greatly enlarged penis was found to be perforated by rod-shaped objects, and an incision through the skin showed that these were pins and hairpins. The pins were about two inches long, with brass heads the size of a peppercorn, and they were at least ten in number. One of the pins was run partly into the testicle. After the foreign objects had been removed, the man informed us that his mistress had stuck these in, in order that she might experience more ardent sensations. The pins were all subcutaneous; several of them ran right round the penis.
Social differences in respect of the frequency of sexual perversions do not exist. Sexual perversions are just as widely diffused among the lower classes as among the upper. A. Ferguson, Havelock Ellis, Tarnowsky, and J. A. Symonds are all in agreement regarding this fact, which, indeed, in view of the anthropological conception of psychopathia sexualis, does not require additional explanation.
Finally, we come to the last and most important point—to the question of the relation of culture and civilization to psychopathia sexualis. Even though psychopathia sexualis is in its essence independent of culture, is a general human phenomenon, still we cannot fail to recognize that civilization has exercised a certain influence upon the external mode of manifestation, and also upon the inner psychical configuration of sexual aberrations. Especially as regards the latter—the psychical relationships—the perversity of the civilized man is more complicated than that of primitive man, although in essence the two are identical.
The modern civilized man is in respect of his sexuality a peculiar dual being. The sexuality within him leads a kind of independent existence, notwithstanding its intimate relationship to the whole of the rest of his spiritual life. There are moments in which, even in men of lofty spiritual nature, pure sexuality becomes separated from love, and manifests itself in its utterly elementary nature beyond good and evil. I expressed earlier the idea that this frequent phenomenon reminded me of the “monomania” of the older alienists. “Il y a en nous deux êtres, l’être moral et la bête: l’être moral sait ce que mérite l’amour véritable, la bête aspire à la fange où on la pousse,” we find in a French erotic work (“Impressions d’une Fille” par Léna de Mauregard, vol. i., pp. 57, 68; Paris, 1900).
No other human impulsive manifestation is so ill adapted as sexuality to the coercion and conventionality which civilization necessarily entails. Carl Hauptmann, in an interesting socio-psychological study, “Unsere Wirklichkeit” (“Our Reality”; Munich, 1902), has described very impressively this frightful conventionality, especially characteristic of our own time, which so painfully represses the “reality” of love, suppresses everything primitive in it, banishes it into the darkness of its own interior, and only allows the conventionally sanctioned forms of sexual love to subsist. This coercion, this outward pressure, develops a volcano of elementary sexuality, which usually slumbers, but may suddenly break out in eruption, and give free vent to excesses of the wildest nature. Dingelstedt in his poem “Ein Roman,” has excellently described this condition:
“Wenn du die Leidenschaft willst kennen lernen,
Musst du dich nur nicht aus der Welt entfernen.
Such’ sie nicht auf in friedlicher Idylle,
In strohgedeckter und begnügter Stille...
Da suche sie in festlich vollem Saale
Bei Spiel und Tanz, an feierlichem Mahle,
Dort, eingeschnürt in Form und Zwang und Sitte,
Thront sie wie Banquos Geist in ihrer Mitte.”
[“If you wish to learn to know passion,
You must, above all, not remove yourself from the world.
Do not look for it in a peaceful idyll,
In padded and satisfied quietude....
Look for it in the full festal hall,
At the game and the dance, at the brilliant banquet;
There, entrapped amid form, and coercion, and custom,
Enthroned, like Banquo’s ghost, it sits amid the throng.”]
Similarly, Charles Albert[483] remarks:
“If love nowadays so often manifests itself in the form of aberration or passion, this is almost always to be explained by the hindrances of every kind which have been opposed to it. No other feeling is so hindered, opposed, detested, and loaded with material and moral fetters. We know how education makes a beginning in this way, declaring that love is something forbidden, and how the hardness of economic life continues the process. Hardly has a young man or a young girl gone out into life, hardly have they begun to feel their way into society, but they encounter a thousand difficulties which are opposed to their living out their life from a sexual point of view. How would it be possible that, in the limits of such a society, love could become anything else but a fixed idea of the individual, and how could it fail to give rise to continuous restlessness? Nature does not allow herself to be inhibited by our artificial social arrangements. The need for love within us remains active; it cries out in unsatisfied desire; and when no answer is forthcoming, beyond the echo of its own pain, it takes a perverse form. The love which is prevented from obtaining complete satisfaction and repose is to many an intensely painful torment.... The over-rich imagination and the unsatisfied longing give rise to the most horrible and abnormal forms of love. Above all, in a society which will make no room for love, the love-passion must give rise to the greatest devastation. The impulse to love which is repressed by the organization of society does not only fight violently for air—the inevitable consequence of any pressure—but it discovers also all those artifices and corruptions which are supposed to make the enjoyment of love more intense. Conscious of being despised by society, it endeavours to regain by violence what is wanting to it in sensuality.”
The struggle for reality in love, for the elementary and the primitive, manifests itself in the search for the greatest possible contrast to the conventional, to the commonly sanctioned mode of sexual activity. Love cries out for “nature,” and comes thereby to the “unnatural,” to the coarsest, commonest dissipation. This connexion has been already explained (pp. 322-325). Certain temporary phenomena exhibit also this fact—for example, the remarkable preference for the most brutal, the coarsest, the commonest dances, mere limb dislocations, such as the cancan, the croquette (machicha), the cake-walk, and other wild negro dances, which rejoice the modern public more than the most beautiful and gracious spiritual ballet. It was only when the above-described connexion became clear to me that I was able to understand the remarkable alluring power of these dances, which had hitherto been incomprehensible to me.