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)
The two emotions most intimately associated with pain are anger and fear.
The more masculine and sthenic emotion of anger, the more passive and
asthenic emotion of fear, are the fundamental animal emotions through
which, on the psychic side, the process of natural selection largely
works. Every animal in some degree owes its survival to the emotional
reaction of anger against weaker rivals, to the emotional reaction of fear
against stronger rivals. To this cause we owe it that these two emotions
are so powerfully and deeply rooted in the whole zoölogical series to
which we belong. But anger and fear are not less fundamental in the sexual
life. Courtship on the male's part is largely a display of combativity,
and even the very gestures by which the male seeks to appeal to the female
are often those gestures of angry hostility by which he seeks to
intimidate enemies. On the female's part courtship is a skillful
manipulation of her own fears, and, as we have seen elsewhere, when
studying the phenomena of modesty, that fundamental attitude of the female
in courtship is nothing but an agglomeration of fears.
The biological significance of the emotions is now well
recognized. "In general," remarks one of the shrewdest writers on
animal psychology, "we may say that emotional states are, under
natural conditions, closely associated with behavior of
biological value--with tendencies that are beneficial in
self-preservation and race preservation--with actions that
promote survival, and especially with the behavior which clusters
round the pairing and parental instincts. The value of the
emotions in animals is that they are an indirect means of
furthering survival." (Lloyd Morgan, _Animal Behavior_, p. 293.)
Emotional aptitudes persist not only by virtue of the fact that
they are still beneficial, but because they once were; that is to
say, they may exist as survivals. In this connection I may quote
from a suggestive paper on "Teasing and Bullying," by F.L. Burk;
at the conclusion of this study, which is founded on a large
body of data concerning American children, the author asks:
"Accepting for the moment the theories of Spencer and Ribot upon
the transmission of rudimentary instincts, is it possible that
the movements which comprise the chief elements of bullying,
teasing, and the egotistic impulses in general of the classes
cited--pursuing, throwing down, punching, striking, throwing
missiles, etc.--are, from the standpoint of consciousness, broken
neurological fragments, which are parts of old chains of activity
involved in the pursuit, combat, capture, torture, and killing of
men and enemies?... Is not this hypothesis of transmitted
fragments of instincts in accord with the strangely anomalous
fact that children are at one moment seemingly cruel and at the
next affectionate and kind, vibrating, as it were, between two
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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