Another injury done to the character of the masturbator is the guilty conscience. Almost every masturbator seems to feel that his acts degrade his manhood.[AR] He seems to know by intuition that his practice is injurious to his health and is morally wrong, because it is not in accord with the general plan of the creative power in the universe. Still in spite of himself, he continues to indulge in it. The will seems to have entirely lost its control. The masturbator is thus engaged in a conflict between moral conviction and sensual indulgence. Herein lies one of the most harmful effects of masturbation. It is undermining the individual’s will-power and destroying his character. Every masturbator resolves again and again, after each exercise, to resist henceforth the inclination and to overcome the temptation,[AS] each time with the same futile result. A paralyzing sensation arises in him, a feeling of shame and self-contempt overtakes him, because he has again failed to show enough energy, has again been too weak to resist the impulse. Finally these disturbing and paralyzing sensations give rise to the conviction of his being lacking in will-power and to the feeling of being generally deficient in everything else in life. In this way, excesses in masturbation harm the generative organs not only directly but also indirectly by first injuring the individual’s entire nervous system, and the different kinds of impotencies are only symptoms of the general neurasthenia. _Mental erethism._—The other kind of sexual excesses, those of mental erethism and frustrate eroticism, are even more harmful than excesses in copulation and masturbation. By mental erethism or, as it is generally called, or rather misnamed, mental masturbation, is understood the filling of the phantasy with lascivious pictures. The dreamers give themselves up to sensual thoughts, allowing the mind to dwell constantly on sexual ideas, or erotic subjects of connubial enjoyments, conjuring before the unruly imagination extravagant and voluptuous visions and bawdry portrayals. The mind is fixed on images of individuals of the other sex, all in lustful positions, on pictures of the nude and of their genitals and of couples in actione coeundi.