friendship which, on the level of pathological sexuality, easily associate themselves with sexual feelings. Passive and mutual onanism then becomes the equivalent of the avoided act. If there is a seducer,—which, unfortunately, is so frequent,—then the cultivated pederast is produced,—i.e., a man who performs quasi acts of onanism with persons of his own sex, and, at the same time, feels and prefers himself in an active rôle corresponding with his real sex; who is mentally indifferent not only to persons of the opposite sex, but also to those of his own sex.
Sexual aberration in the normally constituted, untainted, mentally healthy individual, reaches this degree. No case has been demonstrated in which perversity has been transformed into perversion,—into a reversal of the sexual instinct.[1]
With tainted individuals, the matter is quite different. The latent perverse sexuality is developed under the influence of neurasthenia induced by masturbation, abstinence, or otherwise.
Gradually, in contact with persons of the same sex, sexual excitation by them is induced. Related ideas are colored with
- ↑ Garnier (Anomalies Sexuelles, Paris, pp. 508, 509) reports two cases (Cases 222 and 223) that are apparently opposed to this assumption, particularly the first, in which despair about the unfaithfulness of a lover led the individual to submit to the seductions of men. But the case itself clearly shows that this individual never found pleasure in homo-sexual acts. In Case 223, the individual was effeminated ab origine, or was at least a psychical hermaphrodite.
Those who hold to the opinion that the origin of homo-sexual feelings and instinct is found to be exclusively in defective education and other psychological influences are entirely in error.
An untainted male may be raised never so much like a female, and a female like a male, but they will not become homo-sexual. The natural disposition is the determining condition; not education and other accidental circumstances, like seduction. There can be no thought of contrary sexual instinct save when the person of the same sex exerts a psycho-sexual influence on the individual, and thus brings about libido and orgasm,—i.e., has a psychical attraction. Those cases are quite different in which, faute de mieux, with great sensuality and a defective æsthetic sense, the body of a person of the same sex is used for an onanistic act (not for coitus in a psychical sense).
In his excellent monograph, Moll shows very clearly and convincingly the importance of original predisposition in contrast with exciting causes (comp. op. cit., pp. 156–175). He knows “many cases where early sexual intercourse with men was not capable of inducing perversion.” Moll significantly says, further: “I know of such an epidemic (of mutual onanism) in a Berlin school, where a person who is now an actor shamelessly introduced mutual onanism. Though I now know the names of very many urnings in Berlin, yet I could not ascertain, even with anything like probability, that among all the scholars of that school at that time there was one that had become an urning; but, on the other hand, I have quite certain knowledge that many of those scholars are now normal sexually, in feeling and intercourse.”
