Guttceit.[40] On the other hand, Guttceit's assumption that almost all
girls who attain the age of eighteen or twenty years without any
opportunity for sexual intercourse practise masturbation conflicts with
my own experience. I am acquainted with a number of women of a fairly
ardent temperament who do not masturbate, although they have no
opportunity for sexual intercourse. Moreover, this view is confirmed by
the common experience regarding the relative sexual anaesthesia of women;
it is an admitted fact that complete sexuality is in women far less
readily awakened than it is in men.
I must take this opportunity of referring at some length to a matter
which, though somewhat obscure, is none the less profoundly interesting.
In many instances sexual excitement occurs in children as the result of
a feeling of anxiety; in boys such anxiety may lead to ejaculation, with
or without erection, and with more or less voluptuous sensation. A
schoolboy informed me that he had had a seminal emission with a slight
sense of voluptuous pleasure when in class he was in difficulties with a
passage of unseen translation, and he was afraid he would be unable to
finish the passage before the end of the lesson. Another reported to me
a precisely similar experience; he was overcome with anxiety during a
written examination, and had a seminal emission. A third had an
ejaculation when, being detected in some offence against school
discipline, he was sent for by the headmaster, and was afraid he would
be expelled. Quite a number of similar cases have been reported to me of
sexual excitement occurring in childhood as a sequel to anxiety. I have
recorded the facts, and do not propose to discuss exhaustively the
theoretical aspect of the matter. Perhaps the phenomenon is allied to
masochism, since anxiety is to a certain extent painful. We may also, in
this connexion, think of the seminal emissions sometimes observed in
cases of suicidal hanging. Freud's theory may also be mentioned, that
the anxiety-neurosis is referable to certain sexual processes; but we
must not forget that Freud makes a similar assumption in the case of
other neuroses as well. Stekel,[41] one of Freud's pupils, in an
elaborate monograph, also lays stress on the sexual factor of the
anxiety-neurosis. In my own view, however, Freud's generalisation is too
comprehensive; inasmuch as he symbolises all things in accordance with
his own peculiar preconceptions, the concept sexual receives, in his
hands, an undue extension. But I do not deny the occasional association
of sexual excitement with a sense of anxiety. Certain boys would appear
to have a peculiar predisposition to the occurrence of such processes;
at any rate, several persons have told me that during childhood they had
frequently had ejaculations as a result of feelings of anxiety. As a
rule, however, each of these persons has had such an experience either
once only, or but very few times. Two identical instances have been
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