Legrand (Ann. méd.-psych., May, 1876) mentions a girl, aged 15, who seduced her brother into all manner of sexual excesses on her person; and when, after two years of this incestuous practice, her brother died, she attempted to murder a relative. In the same article there is the case of a married woman, aged 36, who hung her open breast out of a window, and indulged in abuse with her brother, aged 18; and also the case of a mother, aged 39, who practiced incest with her son, with whom she was madly in love, became pregnant by him, and induced abortion.

Through Casper we know that depraved mothers in large cities sometimes treat their little daughters in a most horrible fashion, in order to prepare them for the sexual use of debauchees. This crime belongs elsewhere.

9. Immoral Acts with Persons in the Care of Others; Seduction (Austrian).

(Austrian Statutes, § 131; Abridgment, § 188; German Statutes, § 173).

Allied to incest, but still less repugnant to moral sensibility, are those cases in which persons seduce those entrusted to them for care or education, and who are more or less dependent upon them, to commit or suffer vicious practices. Such acts, which especially deserve legal punishment, seem only exceptionally to have psychopathic significance.

INDEX.


[1]. “Meanwhile, until Philosophy shall at last unite and maintain the world, Hunger and Love impel it onward.”

[2]. Hartmann’s philosophical view of love, in the “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” p. 583, Berlin, 1869, is the following: “Love causes more pain than pleasure. Pleasure is illusory. Reason would cause love to be avoided if it were not for the fatal sexual instinct; therefore, it would be best for a man to have himself castrated.” The same opinion, minus the consequence, is also expressed by Schopenhauer (“Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,” 3. Aufl., Bd. ii, p. 586 u. ff.).