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
On the other hand, when murderous lust has been excited, lust itself
often follows. Lombroso (_op. cit._) alludes to the fact, mentioned by
Mantegazza, that, with fear of being plundered by bandits, there was
always a dread of brutal lust.[43] These examples form transitions to
the pronounced pathological cases.
The examples of the degenerate Cæsars (Nero, Tiberius) are also
instructive. They took delight in having youths and maidens
slaughtered before their eyes. Not less so is the history of that
monster, Marschalls Gilles de Rays (Jacob, “Curiosités de l’histoire
de France,” Paris, 1858), who was executed in 1440, on account of
mutilation and murder, which he had practiced for eight years on more
than eight hundred children. As the monster confessed it, it was from
reading Suetonius and the descriptions of the orgies of Tiberius,
Caracalla, etc., that the idea was gained of locking children in his
castles, torturing them, and then killing them. This inhuman wretch
confessed that in the commission of these acts he enjoyed
inexpressible pleasure. He had two assistants. The bodies of the
unfortunate children were burned, and only a number of heads of
particularly beautiful children were preserved—as memorials.
In an attempt to explain the association of lust and cruelty, it is
necessary to return to a consideration of the quasi-physiological cases,
in which, at the moment of most intense lust, very excitable
individuals, who are otherwise normal, commit such acts as biting and
scratching, which are usually the result of anger. It must further be
remembered that love and anger are not only the most intense emotions,
but also the only two forms of active (sthenic) emotion. Both seek their
object, try to possess themselves of it, and naturally exhaust
themselves in a physical effect on it; both throw the psycho-motor
sphere into the most intense excitement, and thus, by means of this
excitation, reach their normal expression.
From this stand-point it is clear how lust impels to acts that otherwise
are expressive of anger.[44] The one, like the other, is a state of
exaltation, an intense excitation of the whole psycho-motor sphere. Thus
there arises an impulse to react on the object that induces the
stimulus, in every possible way, and with the greatest intensity. Just
as maniacal exaltation easily passes to furibund destructiveness,
exaltation of the sexual emotion often induces an impulse to expend
itself in senseless and apparently harmful acts. To a certain extent
these are psychical accompaniments; but it is not simply an unconscious
excitation of innervation of muscles (which also sometimes occurs as
blind violence); it is a true hyperbulia, a desire to exert the most
intense effect on the individual giving rise to the stimulus. The most
intense means, however, is the infliction of pain.
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