Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in WomenEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
element in this and similar cases is an almost abstract sexual
fascination in the idea of restraint, whether endured, inflicted,
or merely witnessed or imagined; the feet become the chief focus
of this fascination, and the basis on which a foot-fetichism or
shoe-fetichism tends to arise, because restraint of the feet
produces a more marked effect than restraint of the hands.
FOOTNOTES:
[120] An attenuated and symbolic form of this impulse is seen in the
desire to strangle birds with the object of stimulating or even satisfying
sexual desire. Prostitutes are sometimes acquainted with men who bring a
live pigeon with them to be strangled just before intercourse. Lanphear,
of St. Louis (_Alienist and Neurologist_, May, 1907, p. 204) knew a woman,
having learned masturbation in a convent school, who was only excited and
not satisfied by coitus with her husband, and had to rise from bed, catch
and caress a chicken, and finally wring its neck, whereupon orgasm
occurred.
[121] Even young girls, however, may experience pleasure in the playful
attempt to strangle. Thus a lady speaking of herself at the time of
puberty, when she was in the habit of masturbating, writes
(_Sexual-Probleme_, Aug., 1909, p. 636): "I acquired a desire to seize
people, especially girls, by the throat, and I enjoyed their way of
screaming out."
[122] Godard observed that when animals are bled, or felled, as well as
strangled, there is often abundant emission, rich in spermatozoa, but
without erection, though accompanied by the same movements of the tail as
during copulation. Robin (art. "Fécondation," _Dictionnaire Encyclopédique
des Sciences Médicales_), who quotes this observation, has the following
remarks on this subject: "Ejaculation occurring at the moment when the
circulation, maintained artificially, stops is a fact of significance.
It shows how congestive conditions--or inversely anemic
conditions--constitute organic states sufficient to set in movement the
activity of the nerve-centers, as is the case for muscular
contractility.... Everything leads us to believe that at the moment when
the motor nervous action takes place the corresponding sensitive centers
also come into play." It must be added that Minovici, in his elaborate
study of death by hanging ("Etude sur la Pendaison," _Archives
d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, 1905, especially p. 791 et seq.), concludes
that the turgescence of penis and flow of spermatic fluid (sometimes only
prostatic secretion) usually observed in these cases is purely passive and
generally, though not always, of post-mortem occurrence. There is,
therefore, no sexual pleasure in death by hanging, and persons who have
been rescued at the last moment have experienced no voluptuous sensations.
This was so even in the case, referred to by Minovici, of a man who hanged
himself solely with the object of producing sexual pleasure.
[123] Eulenburg, _Sexuale Neuropathie_, p. 114.
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