If he is introverted he gets his sensations through imagining strange
pictures of an inverted world, such as the world depicted in the prose
and poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.
This is, of course, not a complete setting forth of the types; but
merely enough to come to some understanding of their differing sexual
reactions.
If a man or woman is an extraverted thinking or feeling type, the
sexuality is apt to be normal. It is apt to be governed by what the
world considers good form. That is to say, it is probably monogamous,
done at regular intervals, and often without glamor.
But when we come to the intuitives and the sensationals, everything
is quite otherwise. The intuitive is usually in strong opposition to
the sensational. To him sexuality is apt to appear as something low,
animal and disgusting. He himself is often without desire, and cannot
understand the need of it in others.
It is true that sometimes an individual by deep development transcends
the groove of his type, and in this way some intuitives are able
finally to develop their sexuality; but, on the contrary, it is
sometimes dangerous doctrine to ask an intuitive to be sexual.
Intuitives who do this often violate their natures, and so produce
symptoms or become ill. They are apt to oscillate between periods of
intuition and that of sensation, and when they are on the sensational
side they are tempted to make an orgy of it. Sensitive intuitive
artists get drunk and go on debauches: women of this type behave
somewhat like prostitutes.
The Freudians err therefore in their doctrine that sexuality is good
for everyone. It is not good for certain of the intuitives. In fact,
many men and women of this type live on in the full bloom of their
power without knowing a sexual life.
On the other hand, since sexuality permeates the life of the senses
and is all bound up with them, the sensational usually needs and has a
full sexual life. The men are apt to be Casanovas and flit from woman
to woman. Sensations, as we know, if repeated, soon tire us. We long
for new ones. So in a life that depends on sensations and sensational
happenings, soon an appetite develops for something still more strange,
more unexpected, more flavorous. Ordinary sexuality may, to the
sensational, soon lose its zest, and he hungers for things abnormal and
unheard of. In this way, he may develop from one stage to another of
the perversions, not because of a fixation on the mother, or even, in
his case, because of an undeveloped function (since sensation is his
developed function), but merely because sensation itself demands more
and different sensations, and the ordinary round is soon exhausted.
It is said of the sensational that if he can’t get a good sensation, he
will get a bad one; if he can’t get one of pleasure, he will take one
of pain. It is like the poet Keats putting pepper in his mouth so that
the wine would taste the cooler.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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