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)
It will not have escaped the careful reader that in following out our
subject we have sometimes been brought into contact with manifestations
which scarcely seem to come within any definition of pain. This is
undoubtedly so, and the references to these manifestations were not
accidental, for they serve to indicate the real bearings of our subject.
The relationships of love and pain constitute a subject at once of so
much gravity and so much psychological significance that it was well to
devote to them a special study. But pain, as we have here to understand
it, largely constitutes a special case of what we shall later learn to
know as erotic symbolism: that is to say, the psychic condition in which a
part of the sexual process, a single idea or group of ideas, tends to
assume unusual importance, or even to occupy the whole field of sexual
consciousness, the part becoming a symbol that stands for the whole. When
we come to the discussion of this great group of abnormal sexual
manifestations it will frequently be necessary to refer to the results we
have reached in studying the sexual significance of pain.
FOOTNOTES:
[154] See, for instance, the section "Zur Physiologie der Kunst" in
Nietzsche's fragmentary work, _Der Wille zur Macht_, Werke, Bd. xv. Groos
(_Spiele der Menschen_, p. 89) refers to the significance of the fact that
nearly all races have special methods of procuring intoxication. Cf.
Partridge's study of the psychology of alcohol (_American Journal of
Psychology_, April, 1900). "It is hard to imagine," this writer remarks of
intoxicants, "what the religious or social consciousness of primitive man
would have been without them."
[155] The muscular element is the most conspicuous in emotion, though it
is not possible, as a careful student of the emotions (H.R. Marshall,
_Pain, Pleasure, and Æsthetics_, p. 84) well points out, "to limit the
physical activities involved with the emotions to such effects of
voluntary innervation or alteration of size of blood-vessels or spasm of
organic muscle, as Lange seems to think determines them; nor to increase
or decrease of muscle-power, as Féré's results might suggest; nor to such
changes, in relation of size of capillaries, in voluntary innervation, in
respiratory and heart functioning, as Lehmann has observed. Emotions seem
to me to be coincidents of reactions of the whole organism tending to
certain results."
THE SEXUAL IMPULSE IN WOMEN.
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