It is necessary to refer at length to one additional educational method
which plays a very important part in sexual development, namely,
punishment. The sexual perversions known by the names of sadism and
masochism have of late attracted much attention from students of the
sexual life. In sadism, sexual excitement occurs in association with the
infliction of ill-treatment, humiliation, or pain upon others; in
masochism the sexual excitement results from the experience of such
ill-treatment, humiliation, or pain by the masochist in person. But in
sadism, it is not essential that the sadist should himself play the
active part; very often, the maltreatment by a second person of a third
suffices to cause sexual excitement in the sadist who looks on.
Masochistic and sadistic modes of sensibility are frequently associated
in the same individual. As far as the relationship of these perversions
to punishment is concerned, we learn from many adult masochists and
sadists that their first experience of sexual excitement occurred when
as children they received a whipping, or saw another child whipped--at
school, for instance. The oft-quoted case of Rousseau has previously
been mentioned in this work. It is thus evident that the subject of the
punishment of children needs to be considered, not merely from the
general educational point of view, but also from the special outlook of
sexual education. The principal question is whether as a result of
corporal punishment, either personally experienced or witnessed, an
enduring sexual perversion may be induced in a child; and this problem
must be carefully distinguished from another problem, which, however, is
also of very great importance, namely, that of the sexual excitement
which may be experienced by the person who inflicts the punishment. The
significance of the materials available to guide us to a conclusion
upon these questions, is not, however, perfectly clear in all cases. I
may refer to what was said upon p. 130 _et seq._; and will here merely
add that the question whether the infliction of corporal punishment
really originates a perversion in the sufferer, or whether it merely
awakens to activity a pre-existent tendency, and one which, in the
absence of this particular exciting cause, would almost certainly have
been awakened by some other and unavoidable cause, some influence acting
from without--this is a question to which conflicting answers have been
given.
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