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
The case of a man in Vienna, which is reported by Hofmann in his
“Text-Book of Legal Medicine,” is noteworthy in relation to this.
According to the evidence of several prostitutes, before the sexual
act he was accustomed to excite himself by torturing chickens and
pigeons and other birds, and, therefore, was called “Hendlmann”
(chicken).
For the elucidation of such cases the observation of Lombroso is of
value, according to whom two men had ejaculation when they killed
chickens or pigeons, or wrung their necks.
The same author, in his “Uomo delinquente,” p. 201, speaks of a poet
of some reputation, who became powerfully excited sexually whenever he
saw calves slaughtered, and also at the sight of bloody flesh.
According to Mantegazza (_op. cit._, p. 114), among degenerate
Chinamen, a horrible sport consists of committing sodomy with geese,
and cutting their necks off _tempoire ejaculationis_!
Mantegazza (“Fisiologia del piacere,” 5th ed., pp. 394, 395) mentions
the case of a man who once saw chickens killed, and from that time had
a desire to wallow in their warm, steaming entrails, because he
experienced a feeling of lust while doing it.
Thus, in these and similar cases, the vita sexualis is so constituted
_ab origine_ that the sight of blood, death, etc., excites lustful
feeling. It is so in the following case:—
Case 40. C. L., aged 42, engineer, married, father of two children;
from a neuropathic family; father irascible, a drinker; mother
hysterical, subject to eclamptic attacks. The patient remembers that
in childhood he took particular pleasure in witnessing the
slaughtering of domestic animals, especially swine. He thus
experienced lustful pleasure and ejaculation. Later he visited
slaughter-houses, in order to delight in the sight of flowing blood
and the death throes of the animals. When he could find opportunity,
he killed the animals himself, which always afforded him a vicarious
feeling of sexual pleasure.
At the time of full maturity he first attained to a knowledge of his
abnormality. The patient was not exactly opposed in inclination to
women, but close contact with them seemed to him repugnant. On the
advice of a physician, at twenty-five he married a woman who pleased
him, in the hope of freeing himself of his abnormal condition.
Although he was very partial to his wife, it was only seldom, and
after great trouble and exertion of his imagination, that he could
perform coitus with her; nevertheless, he begat two children. In 1866
he was in the war in Bohemia. His letters written at that time to his
wife, were composed in an exalted, enthusiastic tone. He was killed in
the battle of Königgrätz.
If, in this case, the capability of normal coitus was much impaired by
the predominance of perverse ideas, in the next it seems to have been
entirely repressed:—
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