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
A very effectual fetichistic idea was early associated with this. He
noticed that he was attracted and satisfied only by women wearing high
heels and short jackets (“Hungarian fashion”). He does not know how he
arrived at this fetichistic idea. Boys’ legs with high heels also
pleased him, but this charm was purely æsthetic, without any sensual
coloring; and he said he had never noticed anything homo-sexual in
himself. The patient referred his fetichism to his partiality for
calves (legs). He is charmed by ladies’ calves only when elegant shoes
are on the feet. Nude legs—feminine nudity in general—do not in the
least affect him sexually. A subordinate fetichistic idea for the
patient is the masculine ear. It is a lustful pleasure for him to pet
the ears of handsome men, _i.e._, men having beautiful ears. With men
this pleasure is slight, but with women it gives him great enjoyment.
He also has a weakness for cats. He thinks them simply beautiful; and
their movements are very attractive to him. The sight of a cat can
raise him from a feeling of the deepest depression. Cats seem to him
sacred; he sees something divine in them! He does not know the reason
for this idiosyncrasy.
Of late he has also frequently had sadistic ideas about punishing
boys. In these imaginary flagellations both men and women play a part,
but particularly the latter; and then his enjoyment is much more
intense.
The patient finds that, with that which he recognizes and feels as
masochism, there is something else which he prefers to designate
“pageism.”
While his masochistic fancies and acts are entirely of a coarse,
sensual nature, his “pageism” consists of the idea of being a page to
a beautiful girl. He conceives her as perfectly chaste, but piquant;
his relation to her, that of a slave, but perfectly chaste,—a purely
platonic submission. This reveling in the idea of serving such a
“beautiful creature” as a page, is colored by a pleasurable feeling;
but this is in no way sexual. He experienced in it an exquisite
feeling of moral satisfaction, in contrast with the sensually-colored
masochism; and, therefore, he could but regard it as something of a
different nature.
At first sight there was nothing remarkable in the patient’s
appearance; but his pelvis is abnormally broad, the ilia are flat, and
the pelvis, as a whole, tilted and decidedly feminine. Eyes,
neuropathic. He also mentions that he often has itching and lustful
irritation at the anus, and that there (“erogenous” area), _ope
digiti_, he can satisfy himself.
The patient is troubled about his future. Help would be possible for
him if he could but excite in himself an interest in women, but his
will and imagination were too weak for that.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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