A Problem in Modern Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and JuristsSymonds, John Addington
Philosophy
A Problem in Modern Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists
Symonds, John Addington
Homosexuality
us cast a veil over a subject so humiliating to the honour of humanity!"
(p. 177).
As the final result of this analysis, Moreau classifies sexual inversion
with erotomania, nymphomania, satyriasis, bestiality, rape, profanation
of corpses, &c., as the symptom of a grave lesion of the procreative
sense. He seeks to save its victims from the prison by delivering them
over to the asylum. His moral sentiments are so revolted that he does
not even entertain the question whether their instincts are natural and
healthy though abnormal. Lastly, he refuses to face the aspects of this
psychological anomaly which are forced upon the student of ancient
Hellas. He does not even take into account the fact, patent to
experienced observers, that simple folk not unfrequently display no
greater disgust for the abnormalities of sexual appetite than they do
for its normal manifestations.[21]
_Die krankhaften Erscheinungen des Geschlechtssinnes. B. Tarnowsky.
Berlin, Hirschwald_, 1886.
This is avowedly an attempt to distinguish the morbid kinds of sexual
perversion from the merely vicious, and to enforce the necessity of
treating the former not as criminal but as pathological. "The forensic
physician discerns corruption, oversatiated sensuality, deep-rooted
vice, perverse will, &c., where the clinical observer recognises with
certainty a morbid condition of the patient marked by typical steps of
development and termination. Where the one wishes to punish immorality,
the other pleads for the necessity of methodical therapeutic treatment."
The author is a Russian, whose practice in St. Petersburg has brought
him into close professional relations with the male prostitutes and
habitual pæderasts of that capital.
He is able therefore to speak with authority, on the ground of a quite
exceptional knowledge of the moral and physical disturbances connected
with sodomy. I cannot but think that the very peculiarities of his
experience have led him to form incomplete theories. He is too familiar
with venal pathics, pædicators, and effeminates who prostitute their
bodies in the grossest way, to be able to appreciate the subtler
bearings of the problem.
Tarnowsky makes two broad divisions of sexual inversion. The first kind
is inborn, dependent upon hereditary taint and neuropathic diathesis. He
distinguishes three sorts of inborn perversity. In the most marked of
its forms it is chronic and persistent, appearing with the earliest
dawn of puberty, unmodified by education, attaining to its maximum of
intensity in manhood, manifesting, in fact, all the signs of ordinary
sexual inclination. In a second form it is not chronic and persistent,
but periodical. The patient is subject to occasional disturbances of the
nervous centres, which express themselves in violent and irresistible
attacks of the perverted instinct. The third form is epileptical.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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