Case 105. Mrs. X., widow. Owing to the death of her husband and loss of fortune, she had been greatly troubled in mind. She became disturbed mentally, and was admitted to the Salpêtrière after attempting suicide.
Mrs. X., lean, thin; constantly maniacal; she believes herself a man, and flies angry if she is addressed as “madam.” Once, when male clothing was placed at her disposal, she was beside herself with joy. She died, in 1802, of a consumptive malady; and she expressed her delusion of being a man until shortly before her death (Esquirol).
I have already mentioned the interesting relations existing between the facts of delusional transformation of sex and the so-called insanity of the Scythians.
Marandon (“Annales médico-psychologiques,” 1877, p. 161), like others, has erroneously presumed that with the ancient Scythians there was an actual delusion, and that the condition was not merely that of eviration. According to the law of empirical actuality, the delusion, so infrequent to-day, must also have been very infrequent in ancient times. Since it can only be conceived as arising on the basis of a paranoia, there can be no thought of its endemic occurrence; it can only be regarded as a superstitious manifestation of eviration (the result of anger of the goddess), as is also evident from the statements of Hippocrates.
The facts of the so-called Scythian insanity, as well as the facts lately learned about the Pueblo Indians, are also noteworthy anthropologically, in that atrophy of the testes and genitals in general, and approximation to the female type, physically and mentally, were observed. This is the more remarkable, since, in men who have lost their procreative organs, such a reversal of instinct is quite as unusual as in women, mutatis mutandis, after the natural or artificial climacteric.
B. Homo-Sexual Feeling as an Abnormal Congenital Manifestation.[[105]]—The essential feature of this strange manifestation of the sexual life is the want of sexual sensibility for the opposite sex, even to the extent of horror, while sexual inclination and impulse toward the same sex are present. At the same time, the genitals are normally developed, the sexual glands perform their functions properly, and the sexual type is completely differentiated.
Feeling, thought, will, and the whole character, in cases of the complete development of the anomaly, correspond with the peculiar sexual instinct, but not with the sex which the individual represents anatomically and physiologically. This abnormal mode of feeling may not infrequently be recognized in the manner, dress, and calling of the individuals, who may go so far as to yield to an impulse to don the distinctive clothing corresponding with the sexual rôle in which they feel themselves to be.
Anthropologically and clinically, this abnormal manifestation presents various degrees of development:—
1. Traces of hetero-sexual, with predominating homo-sexual, instinct (psycho-sexual hermaphroditism).
2. There exists inclination only toward the same sex (homo-sexuality).