Psychopathia sexualis: With especial reference to contrary sexual instinct: A medico-legal studyKrafft-Ebing, R. von (Richard)
Science
Psychopathia sexualis: With especial reference to contrary sexual instinct: A medico-legal study
Krafft-Ebing, R. von (Richard)
Paraphilias
Case 82. K., aged 45, shoemaker, is reported to be without hereditary
taint. He is peculiar, and has small mental endowment. He is of
masculine habitus and without signs of degeneration. Previously
blameless in conduct, on the evening of July 5, 1876, he was detected
taking stolen female under-garments from a place of concealment. There
were found with him about three hundred articles of the female toilet,
among them, besides chemises and drawers, night-caps, garters, and a
female doll. When arrested he was wearing a chemise. Since his
thirteenth year he had been a slave to an impulse to steal women’s
linen; but, after his first punishment for it, he had become very
careful, and stolen with refinement and success. When this longing
came over him, he would grow anxious, and his head would become heavy.
Then he could not resist the impulse, cost what it might. He was
indifferent to the source of the articles. At night, on going to bed,
he would put on the stolen clothing and create beautiful women in
imagination, thus inducing pleasurable feeling and ejaculation. This
was apparently the motive of his thefts; at least, he had never
disposed of any of the articles, but had hidden them here and there.
He declared that, earlier in his life, he had indulged in normal
sexual intercourse with women. He denied onanism, pederasty, and other
sexual acts. He said he was engaged at twenty-five, but the engagement
was broken through no fault of his. He was incapable of insight into
the abnormality of his condition and the wrong of his acts. (Passow,
_Vierteljahrsschrift f. ger. Medic._, N. F. xxviii, p. 61; Krauss,
“Psychologie des Verbrechens,” 1884, p. 190.)
Hammond (_op. cit._) reports a case of passionate interest in single
articles of female wearing-apparel. Here, also, the patient’s pleasure
consisted in wearing a corset and other female garments (without any
traces of contrary sexual instinct). The pain of tight lacing,
experienced by himself or induced in women, is a delight to
him,—sadistic-masochistic element.
A case probably belonging here is one reported by Diez (“Der
Selbstmord,” 1838, p. 24), where a young man could not resist the
impulse to tear female linen. While tearing it, he always had
ejaculation.
A combination of fetichism with an impulse to destroy the fetich (in a
certain sense, sadism with inanimate objects) seems to occur quite
frequently (comp. Case 93).
An article of dress, which, though it has not really a private
character, by its material and color, as well as by the place where it
is worn, recalls under-garments, and hence has sexual relations, is the
apron (comp. also the metonymic use of the word “apron” for “petticoat”
in the saying, “To chase every apron,” etc.). This explains the
following case:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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