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)
Even when the emotion aroused is disgust it may still act as a sexual
stimulant. Stcherbak has narrated the instructive case of a very
intelligent and elegant married lady of rather delicate constitution, an
artist of some talent, who never experienced any pleasure in sexual
intercourse, but ever since sexual feelings first began to be manifested
at all (at the age of 18) has only experienced them in relation to
disgusting things. Anything that is repulsive, like vomit, etc., causes
vague but pleasurable feelings which she gradually came to recognize as
sexual. The sight of a crushed frog will cause very definite sexual
sensations. She has had many admirers and she has observed that a
declaration of love by a disagreeable or even repulsive man sexually
excites her, though she has no desire for sexual intercourse with
him.[147]
After all that has gone before it is easy to see how the emotion of fear
may act in an analogous manner to anger. Just as anger may reinforce the
active forms of the sexual impulse to which it is allied, so fear may
reinforce the passive forms of that impulse. The following observations,
written by a lady, very well show how we may thus explain the sexual
attractiveness of whipping: "The fascination of whipping, which has always
greatly puzzled me, seems to be a sort of hankering after the stimulus of
fear. In a wild state animals live in constant fear. In civilized life one
but rarely feels it. A woman's pleasure in being afraid of a husband or
lover may be an equivalent of a man's love of adventure; and the fear of
children for their parents may be the dawning of the love of adventure. In
a woman this desire of adventure receives a serious check when she begins
to realize what she might be subjected to by a man if she gratified it.
Excessive fear is demoralizing, but it seems to me that the idea of being
whipped gives a sense of fear which is not excessive. It is almost the
only kind of pain (physical) which is inflicted on children or women by
persons whom they can love and trust, and with a moral object. Any other
kind of bodily ill treatment suggests malignity and may rouse resentment,
and, in extreme cases, an excess of fear which goes beyond the limits of
pleasurable excitement. Given a hereditary feeling of this sort, I think
it is helped by the want of actual experience, as the association with
excitement is freed from the idea of pain as such." In his very valuable
and suggestive study of fears, Stanley Hall, while recognizing the evil of
excessive fear, has emphasized the emotional and even the intellectual
benefits of fear, and the great part played by fear in the evolution of
the race as "the rudimentary organ on the full development and subsequent
reduction of which many of the best things in the soul are dependent."
"Fears that paralyze some brains," he remarks, "are a good tonic for
others. In some form and degree all need it always. Without the fear
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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