An additional factor which favours the origination of sexual perversions is the unrest always connected with the advance of civilization, the haste and hurry, the more severe struggle for existence, the rapid and frequent change of new impressions. Fifty years ago the celebrated alienist Guislain exclaimed:
“What is it with which our thoughts are filled? Plans, novelties, reforms. What is it that we Europeans are striving for? Movement, excitement. What do we obtain? Stimulation, illusion, deception.”[484]
There is no longer any time for quiet, enduring love, for an inward profundity of feeling, for the culture of the heart. The struggle for life and the intellectual contest of our time leaves the possibility only for transient sensations; the shorter they are, the more violent, the more intense must they be, in order to replace the failing grande passion of former times. Love becomes a mere sensation, which in a brief moment must contain within itself an entire world. Modern youth eagerly desires such experience of a whole world by means of love. The everlasting feeling of our classic period had been transformed, more especially among our leading spirits, into a passionate yearning to reflect within themselves truly the spirit of the time, to live through in themselves all the unrest, all the joy, all the sorrow, of modern civilization.
From this there results a peculiar, more spiritual configuration of modern perversity, a distinctive spiritualization of psychopathia sexualis, a true wandering journey, an “Odyssey” of the spirit, throughout the wide province of sexual excesses. Without doubt the French have gone furthest in this direction, and the names of Baudelaire, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Verlaine, Hannon, Haraucourt, Jean Larocque, and Guy de Maupassant, indicate nearly as many peculiar spiritual refinements and enrichments of the purely sensual life.
We have no longer to deal with the pure love of reflection, as in the case of Kierkegaard and Grillparzer, and in the writings of young Germany, where, indeed, reflection predominates, but which still more extends to the direction of higher love. Contrasted with this is the simple lust of the senses, by means of which new psychical influences are to be obtained. Voluptuousness becomes a cerebral phenomenon, ethereal. In this way the most remarkable, unheard-of, sensory associations appear in the province of sexuality—true fin-de-siècle products which are, above all, specifically modern, and could not possibly exist in former times. For it is always the same play of emotion, the same effects, the same terminal results: ordinary voluptuousness. The dream of Hermann Bahr, of “non-sexual voluptuousness,” and the replacement of the animal impulse by means of finer organs, is only a dream. The elemental sexual impulse resists every attempt at dismemberment and sublimation. It returns always unaltered, always the same. It is vain to expect new manifestations of this impulse. Such efforts end either in bodily and mental impotence, or else in sexual perversities. In these relationships the imagination of civilized man is unable to create novelties in the essence; it can do so only as regards the objective manifestations. This is confirmed by the increase of purely ideal sexual perversities in connexion with certain spiritual tendencies of our time. Martial d’Estoc, in his book, “Paris Eros” (Paris, 1903), has given a clear description of these peculiar spiritual modifications of sexual aberrations. (It is interesting to note that Schopenhauer remarks, in his “Neue Paralipomena,” pp. 234 and 235: “The caprices arising from the sexual impulse resemble a will-o’-the-wisp. They deceive us most effectively; but if we follow them, they lead us into the marsh and disappear.”)
APPENDIX
SEXUAL PERVERSIONS DUE TO DISEASE
It is the immortal service of Casper and von Krafft-Ebing to have insisted energetically upon the fact that numerous individuals whose vita sexualis is abnormal are persons suffering from disease. This is their monumentum ære perennius in the history of medicine and of civilization. Purely medical, anatomical, physical, and psychiatric investigations show beyond question that there are many persons whose abnormal sexual life is pathologically based.
I shall not here discuss the peculiar borderland state between health and disease, the existence of which can be established in many sexually perverse individuals; I shall not refer to the “abnormalities,” the “psychopathic deficiencies,” the “unbalanced,” etc.; nor shall I discuss the question of the significance of the stigmata of degeneration, because these will be adequately dealt with in connexion with the forensic consideration of punishable sexual perversions.
Here we shall speak only of actual and easily determined diseases which possess a causal importance in the origination and activity of sexual perversions. The great majority of these are, naturally, mental disorders.