Sadism is characterized by the impulse to cruel and violent treatment of the opposite sex and the coloring of the idea of such acts with lustful feelings.[BB] It is hence a non-feminine trait and is less frequently found in women than in men. Woman’s modesty causes her to keep herself on the defensive until the moment of surrender, while under normal conditions man meets with obstacles in his wooing which it is his part to surmount. He is aggressive, and aggressiveness is closely related to the infliction of pain. It affords men great pleasure to win and conquer women. Nature has given the man for that purpose strength and combativeness. In sadism this aggressiveness is intensified and excessively developed. The patient is dominated by the wish to subdue the object of his desire with cruelty. Bain explains this love of inflicting cruelty as springing from the pleasure the individual finds in the knowledge of the power and domination it has over the maltreated mate. The need of the subjugation of the consort forms a constituent symptom in sadism and may be intensified to such a degree that the patient will not shrink even from murder. Sadism is hence mostly found in men, although in rare instances it also affects women. The anomaly of sadism shows different degrees of intensity. The first degree represents Platonic sadism. The patient does not go any further in his abnormal desires than to commit violent acts in his phantasy only or to draw and paint scenes of violence or to describe such scenes in verse or prose. In the second degree the patient seeks to satisfy his abnormal impulse by striking light blows, or by biting and pricking different parts of the mate’s body. In the third degree of sadism serious wounds are inflicted upon the mate. The patient does not shrink back from mutilating the body of his victim or from committing murder. The fourth degree shows the most abnormal enormities of cruelty, such as emboweling the victim or the ablation of its genitals, evisceration, dismembering the victim, sucking its blood or devouring its flesh. Cases of Platonic sadism are very frequently met with in all classes of society. But since the patients do nobody any harm, such cases never come to the notice of the judge or even of the physician, and are hence never recorded. They are discovered in the course of the anamnesis, at the examination for some other anomaly. One of the author’s patients who was suffering from psychic impotence, a talented painter, in his leisure hours, while sitting in the beer-garden or while conversing with his friends, used to draw on pieces of paper horrible scenes of war and murder, of wounds and blood. When asked about this peculiarity, he confessed that in his imagination he spanks, whips and lashes women until they bleed. Sadistic acts of the second degree sometimes come to the notice of the physician, when he is called upon to treat the wounds inflicted by the patients.