Page:Homo-sexual Life by William John Fielding (1925).pdf/47

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HOMO-SEXUAL LIFE
45

pensable for the understanding of the morbid nature of the symptoms; it almost regularly controls some portion of the social behavior of the patient. The transformation of love into hatred, of tenderness into hostility, which is character of paranoics, takes place by means of the union of cruelty with the libido.

The significance of the erogenous zones in relation to inversion is important. Moll's concept, which divides the sexual impulse into the impulse of contrectation and detumescence, is useful in this field. (Contrectation signifies a desire to touch the skin; detumescence the subsidence of the state of physical sexual preparedness.)

"In the perversions, which claim sexual significance for the oral cavity and the anal opening," as Freud remarks, "the part played by the erogenous zone is quite evident. It behaves in every way like a part of the sexual apparatus. In hysteria, these parts of the body, as well as the tracts of mucous membrane proceeding from them, become the seat of new sensations and innervating changes in a manner similar to the genitals when under the excitement of normal sexual processes."

HOMO-SEXUAL PANIC.

Dr. Edward J. Kempf refers to the pressure of uncontrollable perverse cravings as "acute homosexual panic," which is frequently observed whenever men or women are grouped alone for prolonged periods, as in army camps, aboard ships, on exploring expeditions, in prisons, asylums, and schools.