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
He married a pretty young lady. In spite of lively erections when he
thought of his wife’s shoes, in attempts at cohabitation he was
absolutely impotent; for his distaste for coitus, and for close
intercourse in general, was far more powerful than the influence of
the shoe-idea, which induced sexual excitement. On account of his
impotence, the patient applied to Dr. Hammond, who treated his
epilepsy with bromides, and advised him to hang a shoe up over his
bed, and look at it fixedly during coitus, at the same time imagining
his wife to be a shoe. The patient became free from epileptic attacks,
and potent so that he could have coitus about once a week. Too, his
sexual excitation by women’s shoes grew less and less. (Hammond,
“Sexual Impotence.”)
Following these two cases of shoe-fetichism, which apparently depend
merely upon accidental association, and are not favored by any inner
relation between the things themselves, is given the very strange case
of a fetichist who was excited sexually only by the idea of a night-cap
on the head of an ugly old woman; also a case arising apparently from
merely accidental association:—
Case 89. L., aged 37, clerk, from tainted family, had his first
erection at five years, when he saw his bed-fellow—an aged
relative—put on a night-cap. The same thing occurred later, when he
saw an old servant put on her night-cap. Later, simply the idea of an
old, ugly woman’s head, covered with a night-cap, was sufficient to
cause an erection. Simply the sight of a cap, or of a naked woman or
man, made no impression, but the mere touch of a night-cap induced
erection, and sometimes even ejaculation. L. was not a masturbator,
and had never been sexually active until his thirty-second year, when
he married a young girl with whom he had fallen in love. On his
marriage-night he remained cold until, from necessity, he brought to
his aid the memory-picture of an ugly woman’s head with a night-cap.
Coitus was immediately successful. Thereafter it was always necessary
for him to use this means. Since childhood he had been subject to
occasional attacks of depression, with tendency to suicide, and now
and then to frightful hallucinations at night. When looking out of
windows, he became dizzy and anxious. He was a perverse, peculiar, and
easily embarrassed man, of bad mental constitution. (Charcot and
Magnan, _Arch. de neurol._, 1882, No. 12.)
In this very peculiar case, the simultaneous coincidence of the first
sexual excitation and an absolutely heterogeneous impression seems to
have determined the association.
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