Love and Pain/2

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424604Love and Pain — Volume 2Havelock Ellis

We thus see that there are here two separate groups of feelings: one, in the masculine line, which delights in displaying force and often inflicts pain or the simulacrum of pain; the other, in the feminine line, which delights in submitting to that force, and even finds pleasure in a slight amount of pain, or the idea of pain, when associated with the experiences of love. We see, also, that these two groups of feelings are complementary. Within the limits consistent with normal and healthy life, what men are impelled to give women love to receive. So that we need not unduly deprecate the "cruelty" of men within these limits, nor unduly commiserate the women who are subjected to it.

Such a conclusion, however, as we have also seen, only holds good within those normal limits which an attempt has here been made to determine. The phenomena we have been considering are strictly normal phenomena, having their basis in the conditions of tumescence and detumescence in animal and primitive human courtship. At one point, however, when discussing the phenomena of the love-bite, I referred to the facts which indicate how this purely normal manifestation yet insensibly passes over into the region of the morbid. It is an instance that enables us to realize how even the most terrible and repugnant sexual perversions are still demonstrably linked on to phenomena that are fundamentally normal. The love-bite may be said to give us the key to that perverse impulse which has been commonly called sadism.

There is some difference of opinion as to how "sadism" may be best defined. Perhaps the simplest and most usual definition is that of Krafft-Ebing, as sexual emotion associated with the wish to inflict pain and use violence, or, as he elsewhere expresses it, "the impulse to cruel and violent treatment of the opposite sex, and the coloring of the idea of such acts with lustful feeling."[83] A more complete definition is that of Moll, who describes sadism as a condition in which "the sexual impulse consists in the tendency to strike, ill-use, and humiliate the beloved person."[84] This definition has the advantage of bringing in the element of moral pain. A further extension is made in Fere's definition as "the need of association of violence and cruelty with sexual enjoyment, such violence or cruelty not being necessarily exerted by the person himself who seeks sexual pleasure in this association."[85] Garnier's definition, while comprising all these points, further allows for the fact that a certain degree of sadism may be regarded as normal. "Pathological sadism," he states, "is an impulsive and obsessing sexual perversion characterized by a close connection between suffering inflicted or mentally represented and the sexual orgasm, without this necessary and sufficing condition frigidity usually remaining absolute."[86] It must be added that these definitions are very incomplete if by "sadism" we are to understand the special sexual perversions which are displayed in De Sade's novels. Iwan Bloch ("Eugen Duehren"), in the course of his book on De Sade, has attempted a definition strictly on this basis, and, as will be seen, it is necessary to make it very elaborate: "A connection, whether intentionally sought or offered by chance, of sexual excitement and sexual enjoyment with the real or only symbolic (ideal, illusionary) appearance of frightful and shocking events, destructive occurrences and practices, which threaten or destroy the life, health, and property of man and other living creatures, and threaten and interrupt the continuity of inanimate objects, whereby the person who from such occurrences obtains sexual enjoyment may either himself be the direct cause, or cause them to take place by means of other persons, or merely be the spectator, or, finally, be, voluntarily or involuntarily, the object against which these processes are directed."[87] This definition of sadism as found in De Sade's works is thus, more especially by its final clause, a very much wider conception than the usual definition.

   Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis De Sade, was born in 1740 at
   Paris in the house of the great Conde. He belonged to a very
   noble, ancient, and distinguished Provencal family; Petrarch's
   Laura, who married a De Sade, was one of his ancestors, and the
   family had cultivated both arms and letters with success. He was,
   according to Lacroix, "an adorable youth whose delicately pale
   and dusky face, lighted up by two large black [according to
   another account blue] eyes, already bore the languorous imprint
   of the vice which was to corrupt his whole being"; his voice was
   "drawling and caressing"; his gait had "a softly feminine grace."
   Unfortunately there is no authentic portrait of him. His early
   life is sketched in letter iv of his _Aline et Valcourt_. On
   leaving the College-Louis-le-Grand he became a cavalry officer
   and went through the Seven Years' War in Germany. There can be
   little doubt that the experiences of his military life, working
   on a femininely vicious temperament, had much to do with the
   development of his perversion. He appears to have got into
   numerous scrapes, of which the details are unknown, and his
   father sought to marry him to the daughter of an aristocratic
   friend of his own, a noble and amiable girl of 20. It so chanced
   that when young De Sade first went to the house of his future
   wife only her younger sister, a girl of 13, was at home; with her
   he at once fell in love and his love was reciprocated; they were
   both musical enthusiasts, and she had a beautiful voice. The
   parents insisted on carrying out the original scheme of marriage.
   De Sade's wife loved him, and, in spite of everything, served his
   interests with Griselda-like devotion; she was, Ginisty remarks,
   a saint, a saint of conjugal life; but her love was from the
   first only requited with repulsion, contempt, and suspicion.
   There were, however, children of the marriage; the career of the
   eldest--an estimable young man who went into the army and also
   had artistic ability, but otherwise had no community of tastes
   with his father--has been sketched by Paul Ginisty, who has also
   edited the letters of the Marquise. De Sade's passion for the
   younger sister continued (he idealized her as Juliette), though
   she was placed in a convent beyond his reach, and at a much later
   period he eloped with her and spent perhaps the happiest period
   of his life, soon terminated by her death. It is evident that
   this unhappy marriage was decisive in determining De Sade's
   career; he at once threw himself recklessly into every form of
   dissipation, spending his health and his substance sometimes
   among refinedly debauched nobles and sometimes among coarsely
   debauched lackeys. He was, however, always something of an
   artist, something of a student, something of a philosopher, and
   at an early period he began to write, apparently at the age of
   23. It was at this age, and only a few months after his marriage,
   that on account of some excess he was for a time confined in
   Vincennes. He was destined to spend 27 years of his life in
   prisons, if we include the 13 years which in old age he passed in
   the asylum at Charenton. His actual offenses were by no means so
   terrible as those he loved to dwell on in imagination, and for
   the most part they have been greatly exaggerated. His most
   extreme offenses were the indecent and forcible flagellation in
   1768 of a young woman, Rosa Keller, who had accosted him in the
   street for alms, and whom he induced by false pretenses to come
   to his house, and the administration of aphrodisiacal bonbons to
   some prostitutes at Marseilles. It is owing to the fact that the
   prime of his manhood was spent in prisons that De Sade fell back
   on dreaming, study, and novel-writing. Shut out from real life,
   he solaced his imagination with the perverted visions--to a very
   large extent, however, founded on knowledge of the real facts of
   perverted life in his time--which he has recorded in _Justine_
   (1781); _Les 120 Journees de Sodome ou l'Ecole du Libertinage_
   (1785); _Aline et Valcour ou le Roman Philosophique_ (1788);
   _Juliette_ (1796); _La Philosophie dans le Boudoir_ (1795). These
   books constitute a sort of encyclopedia of sexual perversions, an
   eighteenth century _Psychopathia Sexualis_, and embody, at the
   same time, a philosophy. He was the first, Bloch remarks, who
   realized the immense importance of the sexual question. His
   general attitude may be illustrated by the following passage (as
   quoted by Lacassagne): "If there are beings in the world whose
   acts shock all accepted prejudices, we must not preach at them or
   punish them ... because their bizarre tastes no more depend upon
   themselves than it depends on you whether you are witty or
   stupid, well made or hump-backed.... What would become of your
   laws, your morality, your religion, your gallows, your Paradise,
   your gods, your hell, if it were shown that such and such
   fluids, such fibers, or a certain acridity in the blood, or in
   the animal spirits, alone suffice to make a man the object of
   your punishments or your rewards?" He was enormously well read,
   Bloch points out, and his interest extended to every field of
   literature: _belles lettres_, philosophy, theology, politics,
   sociology, ethnology, mythology, and history. Perhaps his
   favorite reading was travels. He was minutely familiar with the
   bible, though his attitude was extremely critical. His favorite
   philosopher was Lamettrie, whom he very frequently quotes, and he
   had carefully studied Machiavelli.
   De Sade had foreseen the Revolution; he was an ardent admirer of
   Marat, and at this period he entered into public life as a mild,
   gentle, rather bald and gray-haired person. Many scenes of the
   Revolution were the embodiment in real life of De Sade's
   imagination; such, for instance, were the barbaric tortures
   inflicted, at the instigation of Theroigne de Mericourt, on La
   Belle Bouquetiere. Yet De Sade played a very peaceful part in the
   events of that time, chiefly as a philanthropist, spending much
   of his time in the hospitals. He saved his parents-in-law from
   the scaffold, although they had always been hostile to him, and
   by his moderation aroused the suspicions of the revolutionary
   party, and was again imprisoned. Later he wrote a pamphlet
   against Napoleon, who never forgave him and had him shut up in
   Charenton as a lunatic; it was a not unusual method at that time
   of disposing of persons whom it was wished to put out of the way,
   and, notwithstanding De Sade's organically abnormal temperament,
   there is no reason to regard him as actually insane.
   Royer-Collard, an eminent alienist of that period, then at the
   head of Charenton, declared De Sade to be sane, and his detailed
   report is still extant. Other specialists were of the same
   opinion. Bloch, who quotes these opinions (_Neue Forschungen_,
   etc., p. 370), says that the only possible conclusion is that De
   Sade was sane, but neurasthenic, and Eulenburg also concludes
   that he cannot be regarded as insane, although he was highly
   degenerate. In the asylum he amused himself by organizing a
   theater. Lacroix, many years later, questioning old people who
   had known him, was surprised to find that even in the memory of
   most virtuous and respectable persons he lived merely as an
   "_aimable mauvais sujet_." It is noteworthy that De Sade aroused,
   in a singular degree, the love and devotion of women,--whether or
   not we may regard this as evidence of the fascination exerted on
   women by cruelty. Janin remarks that he had seen many pretty
   little letters written by young and charming women of the great
   world, begging for the release of the "_pauvre marquis_."
   Sardou, the dramatist, has stated that in 1855 he visited the
   Bicetre and met an old gardener who had known De Sade during his
   reclusion there. He told that one of the marquis's amusements
   was to procure baskets of the most beautiful and expensive roses;
   he would then sit on a footstool by a dirty streamlet which ran
   through the courtyard, and would take the roses, one by one, gaze
   at them, smell them with a voluptuous expression, soak them in
   the muddy water, and fling them away, laughing as he did so. He
   died on the 2d of December, 1814, at the age of 74. He was almost
   blind, and had long been a martyr to gout, asthma, and an
   affection of the stomach. It was his wish that acorns should be
   planted over his grave and his memory effaced. At a later period
   his skull was examined by a phrenologist, who found it small and
   well formed; "one would take it at first for a woman's head." The
   skull belonged to Dr. Londe, but about the middle of the century
   it was stolen by a doctor who conveyed it to England, where it
   may possibly yet be found. [The foregoing account is mainly
   founded on Paul Lacroix, _Revue de Paris_, 1837, and _Curiosites
   de l'Histoire de France_, second series, _Proces Celebres_, p.
   225; Janin, _Revue de Paris_, 1834; Eugen Duehren (Iwan Bloch),
   _Der Marquis de Sade und Seine Zeit_, third edition, 1901; id.,
   _Neue Forschungen ueber den Marquis de Sade und Seine Zeit_, 1904;
   Lacassagne, _Vacher l'Eventreur et les Crimes Sadiques_, 1899;
   Paul Ginisty, _La Marquise de Sade_, 1901.]

The attempt to define sadism strictly and penetrate to its roots in De Sade's personal temperament reveals a certain weakness in the current conception of this sexual perversion. It is not, as we might infer, both from the definition usually given and from its probable biological heredity from primitive times, a perversion due to excessive masculinity. The strong man is more apt to be tender than cruel, or at all events knows how to restrain within bounds any impulse to cruelty; the most extreme and elaborate forms of sadism (putting aside such as are associated with a considerable degree of imbecility) are more apt to be allied with a somewhat feminine organization. Montaigne, indeed, observed long ago that cruelty is usually accompanied by feminine softness.

   In the same way it is a mistake to suppose that the very feminine
   woman is not capable of sadistic tendencies. Even if we take into
   account the primitive animal conditions of combat, the male must
   suffer as well as inflict pain, and the female must not only
   experience subjection to the male, but also share in the emotions
   of her partner's victory over his rivals. As bearing on these
   points, I may quote the following remarks written by a lady: "It
   is said that, the weaker and more feminine a woman is, the
   greater the subjection she likes. I don't think it has anything
   at all to do with the general character, but depends entirely on
   whether the feeling of constraint and helplessness affects her
   sexually. In men I have several times noticed that those who were
   most desirous of subjection to the women they loved had, in
   ordinary life, very strong and determined characters. I know of
   others, too, who with very weak characters are very imperious
   toward the women they care for. Among women I have often been
   surprised to see how a strong, determined woman will give way to
   a man she loves, and how tenacious of her own will may be some
   fragile, clinging creature who in daily life seems quite unable
   to act on her own responsibility. A certain amount of passivity,
   a desire to have their emotions worked on, seems to me, so far as
   my small experience goes, very common among ordinary, presumably
   normal men. A good deal of stress is laid on femininity as an
   attraction in a woman, and this may be so to very strong natures,
   but, so far as I have seen, the women who obtain extraordinary
   empire over men are those with a certain _virility_ in their
   character and passions. If with this virility they combine a
   fragility or childishness of appearance which appeals to a man in
   another way at the same time, they appear to be irresistible."
   I have noted some of the feminine traits in De Sade's temperament
   and appearance. The same may often be noted in sadists whose
   crimes were very much more serious and brutal than those of De
   Sade. A man who stabbed women in the streets at St. Louis was a
   waiter with a high-pitched, effeminate voice and boyish
   appearance. Reidel, the sadistic murderer, was timid, modest, and
   delicate; he was too shy to urinate in the presence of other
   people. A sadistic zooephilist, described by A. Marie, who
   attempted to strangle a woman fellow-worker, had always been very
   timid, blushed with much facility, could not look even children
   in the eyes, or urinate in the presence of another person, or
   make sexual advances to women.
   Kiernan and Moyer are inclined to connect the modesty and
   timidity of sadists with a disgust for normal coitus. They were
   called upon to examine an inverted married woman who had
   inflicted several hundred wounds, mostly superficial, with forks,
   scissors, etc., on the genital organs and other parts of a girl
   whom she had adopted from a "Home." This woman was very prominent
   in church and social matters in the city in which she lived, so
   that many clergymen and local persons of importance testified to
   her chaste, modest, and even prudish character; she was found to
   be sane at the time of the acts. (Moyer, _Alienist and
   Neurologist_, May, 1907, and private letter from Dr. Kiernan.)

We are thus led to another sexual perversion, which is usually considered the opposite of sadism. Masochism is commonly regarded as a peculiarly feminine sexual perversion, in women, indeed, as normal in some degree, and in man as a sort of inversion of the normal masculine emotional attitude, but this view of the matter is not altogether justified, for definite and pronounced masochism seems to be much rarer in women than sadism.[88] Krafft-Ebing, whose treatment of this phenomenon is, perhaps, his most valuable and original contribution to sexual psychology, has dealt very fully with the matter and brought forward many cases. He thus defines this perversion: "By masochism I understand a peculiar perversion of the psychical _vita sexualis_ in which the individual affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex, of being treated by this person as by a master, humiliated and abused. This idea is colored by sexual feeling; the masochist lives in fancies in which he creates situations of this kind, and he often attempts to realize them."[89]

In a minor degree, not amounting to a complete perversion of the sexual instinct, this sentiment of abnegation, the desire to be even physically subjected to the adored woman, cannot be regarded as abnormal. More than two centuries before Krafft-Ebing appeared, Robert Burton, who was no mean psychologist, dilated on the fact that love is a kind of slavery. "They are commonly slaves," he wrote of lovers, "captives, voluntary servants; _amator amicae mancipium_, as Castilio terms him; his mistress's servant, her drudge, prisoner, bondman, what not?"[90] Before Burton's time the legend of the erotic servitude of Aristotle was widely spread in Europe, and pictures exist of the venerable philosopher on all fours ridden by a woman with a whip.[91] In classic times various masochistic phenomena are noted with approval by Ovid. It has been pointed out by Moll[92] that there are traces of masochistic feeling in some of Goethe's poems, especially "Lilis Park" and "Erwin und Elmire." Similar traces have been found in the poems of Heine, Platen, Hamerling, and many other poets.[93] The poetry of the people is also said to contain many such traces. It may, indeed, be said that passion in its more lyric exaltations almost necessarily involves some resort to masochistic expression. A popular lady novelist in a novel written many years ago represents her hero, a robust soldier, imploring the lady of his love, in a moment of passionate exaltation, to trample on him, certainly without any wish to suggest sexual perversion. If it is true that the Antonio of Otway's _Venice Preserved_ is a caricature of Shaftesbury, then it would appear that one of the greatest of English statesmen was supposed to exhibit very pronounced and characteristic masochistic tendencies; and in more recent days masochistic expressions have been noted as occurring in the love-letters of so emphatically virile a statesman as Bismarck.

Thus a minor degree of the masochistic tendency may be said to be fairly common, while its more pronounced manifestations are more common than pronounced sadism.[94] It very frequently affects persons of a sensitive, refined, and artistic temperament. It may even be said that this tendency is in the line of civilization. Krafft-Ebing points out that some of the most delicate and romantic love-episodes of the Middle Ages are distinctly colored by masochistic emotion.[95] The increasing tendency to masochism with increasing civilization becomes explicable if we accept Colin Scott's "secondary law of courting" as accessory to the primary law that the male is active, and the female passive and imaginatively attentive to the states of the excited male. According to the secondary law, "the female develops a superadded activity, the male becoming relatively passive and imaginatively attentive to the psychical and bodily states of the female."[96] We may probably agree that this "secondary law of courting" does really represent a tendency of love in individuals of complex and sensitive nature, and the outcome of such a receptive attitude on the part of the male is undoubtedly in well-marked cases a desire of submission to the female's will, and a craving to experience in some physical or psychic form, not necessarily painful, the manifestations of her activity.

When we turn from vague and unpronounced forms of the masochistic tendency to the more definite forms in which it becomes an unquestionable sexual perversion, we find a very eminent and fairly typical example in Rousseau, an example all the more interesting because here the subject has himself portrayed his perversion in his famous _Confessions_. It is, however, the name of a less eminent author, the Austrian novelist, Sacher-Masoch, which has become identified with the perversion through the fact that Krafft-Ebing fixed upon it as furnishing a convenient counterpart to the term "sadism." It is on the strength of a considerable number of his novels and stories, more especially of _Die Venus im Pelz_, that Krafft-Ebing took the scarcely warrantable liberty of identifying his name, while yet living, with a sexual perversion.

   Sacher-Masoch's biography has been written with intimate
   knowledge and much candor by C.F. von Schlichtegroll
   (_Sacher-Masoch und der Masochismus_, 1901) and, more indirectly,
   by his first wife Wanda von Sacher-Masoch in her autobiography
   (_Meine Lebensbeichte_, 1906; French translation, _Confession de
   ma Vie_, 1907). Schlichtegroll's book is written with a somewhat
   undue attempt to exalt his hero and to attribute his misfortunes
   to his first wife. The autobiography of the latter, however,
   enables us to form a more complete picture of Sacher-Masoch's
   life, for, while his wife by no means spares herself, she clearly
   shows that Sacher-Masoch was the victim of his own abnormal
   temperament, and she presents both the sensitive, refined,
   exalted, and generous aspects of his nature, and his morbid,
   imaginative, vain aspects.
   Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in 1836 at Lemberg in Galicia.
   He was of Spanish, German, and more especially Slavonic race. The
   founder of the family may be said to be a certain Don Matthias
   Sacher, a young Spanish nobleman, in the sixteenth century, who
   settled in Prague. The novelist's father was director of police
   in Lemberg and married Charlotte von Masoch, a Little Russian
   lady of noble birth. The novelist, the eldest child of this
   union, was not born until after nine years of marriage, and in
   infancy was so delicate that he was not expected to survive. He
   began to improve, however, when his mother gave him to be suckled
   to a robust Russian peasant woman, from whom, as he said later,
   he gained not only health, but "his soul"; from her he learned
   all the strange and melancholy legends of her people and a love
   of the Little Russians which never left him. While still a child
   young Sacher-Masoch was in the midst of the bloody scenes of the
   revolution which culminated in 1848. When he was 12 the family
   migrated to Prague, and the boy, though precocious in his
   development, then first learned the German language, of which he
   attained so fine a mastery. At a very early age he had found the
   atmosphere, and even some of the most characteristic elements, of
   the peculiar types which mark his work as a novelist.
   It is interesting to trace the germinal elements of those
   peculiarities which so strongly affected his imagination on the
   sexual side. As a child, he was greatly attracted by
   representations of cruelty; he loved to gaze at pictures of
   executions, the legends of martyrs were his favorite reading, and
   with the onset of puberty he regularly dreamed that he was
   fettered and in the power of a cruel woman who tortured him. It
   has been said by an anonymous author that the women of Galicia
   either rule their husbands entirely and make them their slaves or
   themselves sink to be the wretchedest of slaves. At the age of
   10, according to Schlichtegroll's narrative, the child Leopold
   witnessed a scene in which a woman of the former kind, a certain
   Countess Xenobia X., a relative of his own on the paternal side,
   played the chief part, and this scene left an undying impress on
   his imagination. The Countess was a beautiful but wanton
   creature, and the child adored her, impressed alike by her beauty
   and the costly furs she wore. She accepted his devotion and
   little services and would sometimes allow him to assist her in
   dressing; on one occasion, as he was kneeling before her to put
   on her ermine slippers, he kissed her feet; she smiled and gave
   him a kick which filled him with pleasure. Not long afterward
   occurred the episode which so profoundly affected his
   imagination. He was playing with his sisters at hide-and-seek and
   had carefully hidden himself behind the dresses on a clothes-rail
   in the Countess's bedroom. At this moment the Countess suddenly
   entered the house and ascended the stairs, followed by a lover,
   and the child, who dared not betray his presence, saw the
   countess sink down on a sofa and begin to caress her lover. But a
   few moments later the husband, accompanied by two friends, dashed
   into the room. Before, however, he could decide which of the
   lovers to turn against the Countess had risen and struck him so
   powerful a blow in the face with her fist that he fell back
   streaming with blood. She then seized a whip, drove all three men
   out of the room, and in the confusion the lover slipped away. At
   this moment the clothes-rail fell and the child, the involuntary
   witness of the scene, was revealed to the Countess, who now fell
   on him in anger, threw him to the ground, pressed her knee on his
   shoulder, and struck him unmercifully. The pain was great, and
   yet he was conscious of a strange pleasure. While this
   castigation was proceeding the Count returned, no longer in a
   rage, but meek and humble as a slave, and kneeled down before her
   to beg forgiveness. As the boy escaped he saw her kick her
   husband. The child could not resist the temptation to return to
   the spot; the door was closed and he could see nothing, but he
   heard the sound of the whip and the groans of the Count beneath
   his wife's blows.
   It is unnecessary to insist that in this scene, acting on a
   highly sensitive and somewhat peculiar child, we have the key to
   the emotional attitude which affected so much of Sacher-Masoch's
   work. As his biographer remarks, woman became to him, during a
   considerable part of his life, a creature at once to be loved and
   hated, a being whose beauty and brutality enabled her to set her
   foot at will on the necks of men, and in the heroine of his first
   important novel, the _Emissaer_, dealing with the Polish
   Revolution, he embodied the contradictory personality of Countess
   Xenobia. Even the whip and the fur garments, Sacher-Masoch's
   favorite emotional symbols, find their explanation in this early
   episode. He was accustomed to say of an attractive woman: "I
   should like to see her in furs," and, of an unattractive woman:
   "I could not imagine her in furs." His writing-paper at one time
   was adorned with the figure of a woman in Russian Boyar costume,
   her cloak lined with ermine, and brandishing a scourge. On his
   walls he liked to have pictures of women in furs, of the kind of
   which there is so magnificent an example by Rubens in the gallery
   at Munich. He would even keep a woman's fur cloak on an ottoman
   in his study and stroke it from time to time, finding that his
   brain thus received the same kind of stimulation as Schiller
   found in the odor of rotten apples.[97]
   At the age of 13, in the revolution of 1848, young Sacher-Masoch
   received his baptism of fire; carried away in the popular
   movement, he helped to defend the barricades together with a
   young lady, a relative of his family, an amazon with a pistol in
   her girdle, such as later he loved to depict. This episode was,
   however, but a brief interruption of his education; he pursued
   his studies with brilliance, and on the higher side his education
   was aided by his father's esthetic tastes. Amateur theatricals
   were in special favor at his home, and here even the serious
   plays of Goethe and Gogol were performed, thus helping to train
   and direct the boy's taste. It is, perhaps, however, significant
   that it was a tragic event which, at the age of 16, first brought
   to him the full realization of life and the consciousness of his
   own power. This was the sudden death of his favorite sister. He
   became serious and quiet, and always regarded this grief as a
   turning-point in his life.
   At the Universities of Prague and Graz he studied with such zeal
   that when only 19 he took his doctor's degree in law and shortly
   afterward became a _privatdocent_ for German history at Graz.
   Gradually, however, the charms of literature asserted themselves
   definitely, and he soon abandoned teaching. He took part,
   however, in the war of 1866 in Italy, and at the battle of
   Solferino he was decorated on the field for bravery in action by
   the Austrian field-marshal. These incidents, however, had little
   disturbing influence on Sacher-Masoch's literary career, and he
   was gradually acquiring a European reputation by his novels and
   stories.
   A far more seriously disturbing influence had already begun to be
   exerted on his life by a series of love-episodes. Some of these
   were of slight and ephemeral character; some were a source of
   unalloyed happiness, all the more so if there was an element of
   extravagance to appeal to his Quixotic nature. He always longed
   to give a dramatic and romantic character to his life, his wife
   says, and he spent some blissful days on an occasion when he ran
   away to Florence with a Russian princess as her private
   secretary. Most often these episodes culminated in deception and
   misery. It was after a relationship of this kind from which he
   could not free himself for four years that he wrote _Die
   Geschiedene Frau, Passionsgeschichte eines Idealisten_, putting
   into it much of his own personal history. At one time he was
   engaged to a sweet and charming young girl. Then it was that he
   met a young woman at Graz, Laura Ruemelin, 27 years of age,
   engaged as a glove-maker, and living with her mother. Though of
   poor parentage, with little or no knowledge of the world, she had
   great natural ability and intelligence. Schlichtegroll represents
   her as spontaneously engaging in a mysterious intrigue with the
   novelist. Her own detailed narrative renders the circumstances
   more intelligible. She approached Sacher-Masoch by letter,
   adopting for disguise the name of his heroine Wanda von Dunajev,
   in order to recover possession of some compromising letters which
   had been written to him, as a joke, by a friend of hers.
   Sacher-Masoch insisted on seeing his correspondent before
   returning the letters, and with his eager thirst for romantic
   adventure he imagined that she was a married woman of the
   aristocratic world, probably a Russian countess, whose simple
   costume was a disguise. Not anxious to reveal the prosaic facts,
   she humored him in his imaginations and a web of mystification
   was thus formed. A strong attraction grew up on both sides and,
   though for some time Laura Ruemelin maintained the mystery and
   held herself aloof from him, a relationship was formed and a
   child born. Thereupon, in 1893, they married. Before long,
   however, there was disillusion on both sides. She began to detect
   the morbid, chimerical, and unpractical aspects of his character,
   and he realized that not only was his wife not an aristocrat,
   but, what was of more importance to him, she was by no means the
   domineering heroine of his dreams. Soon after marriage, in the
   course of an innocent romp in which the whole of the small
   household took part, he asked his wife to inflict a whipping on
   him. She refused, and he thereupon suggested that the servant
   should do it; the wife failed to take this idea seriously; but he
   had it carried out, with great satisfaction at the severity of
   the castigation he received. When, however, his wife explained to
   him that, after this incident, it was impossible for the servant
   to stay, Sacher-Masoch quite agreed and she was at once
   discharged. But he constantly found pleasure in placing his wife
   in awkward or compromising circumstances, a pleasure she was too
   normal to share. This necessarily led to much domestic
   wretchedness. He had persuaded her, against her wish, to whip him
   nearly every day, with whips which he devised, having nails
   attached to them. He found this a stimulant to his literary work,
   and it enabled him to dispense in his novels with his stereotyped
   heroine who is always engaged in subjugating men, for, as he
   explained to his wife, when he had the reality in his life he was
   no longer obsessed by it in his imaginative dreams. Not content
   with this, however, he was constantly desirous for his wife to be
   unfaithful. He even put an advertisement in a newspaper to the
   effect that a young and beautiful woman desired to make the
   acquaintance of an energetic man. The wife, however, though she
   wished to please her husband, was not anxious to do so to this
   extent. She went to an hotel by appointment to meet a stranger
   who had answered this advertisement, but when she had explained
   to him the state of affairs he chivalrously conducted her home.
   It was some time before Sacher-Masoch eventually succeeded in
   rendering his wife unfaithful. He attended to the minutest
   details of her toilette on this occasion, and as he bade her
   farewell at the door he exclaimed: "How I envy him!" This episode
   thoroughly humiliated the wife, and from that moment her love for
   her husband turned to hate. A final separation was only a
   question of time. Sacher-Masoch formed a relationship with Hulda
   Meister, who had come to act as secretary and translator to him,
   while his wife became attached to Rosenthal, a clever journalist
   later known to readers of the _Figaro_ as "Jacques St.-Cere," who
   realized her painful position and felt sympathy and affection for
   her. She went to live with him in Paris and, having refused to
   divorce her husband, he eventually obtained a divorce from her;
   she states, however, that she never at any time had physical
   relationships with Rosenthal, who was a man of fragile
   organization and health. Sacher-Masoch united himself to Hulda
   Meister, who is described by the first wife as a prim and faded
   but coquettish old maid, and by the biographer as a highly
   accomplished and gentle woman, who cared for him with almost
   maternal devotion. No doubt there is truth in both descriptions.
   It must be noted that, as Wanda clearly shows, apart from his
   abnormal sexual temperament, Sacher-Masoch was kind and
   sympathetic, and he was strongly attached to his eldest child.
   Eulenburg also quotes the statement of a distinguished Austrian
   woman writer acquainted with him that, "apart from his sexual
   eccentricities, he was an amiable, simple, and sympathetic man
   with a touchingly tender love for his children." He had very few
   needs, did not drink or smoke, and though he liked to put the
   woman he was attached to in rich furs and fantastically gorgeous
   raiment he dressed himself with extreme simplicity. His wife
   quotes the saying of another woman that he was as simple as a
   child and as naughty as a monkey.
   In 1883 Sacher-Masoch and Hulda Meister settled in Lindheim, a
   village in Germany near the Taunus, a spot to which the novelist
   seems to have been attached because in the grounds of his little
   estate was a haunted and ruined tower associated with a tragic
   medieval episode. Here, after many legal delays, Sacher-Masoch
   was able to render his union with Hulda Meister legitimate; here
   two children were in due course born, and here the novelist spent
   the remaining years of his life in comparative peace. At first,
   as is usual, treated with suspicion by the peasants,
   Sacher-Masoch gradually acquired great influence over them; he
   became a kind of Tolstoy in the rural life around him, the friend
   and confidant of all the villagers (something of Tolstoy's
   communism is also, it appears, to be seen in the books he wrote
   at this time), while the theatrical performances which he
   inaugurated, and in which his wife took an active part, spread
   the fame of the household in many neighboring villages. Meanwhile
   his health began to break up; a visit to Nauheim in 1894 was of
   no benefit, and he died March 9, 1895.

A careful consideration of the phenomena of sadism and masochism may be said to lead us to the conclusion that there is no real line of demarcation. Even De Sade himself was not a pure sadist, as Bloch's careful definition is alone sufficient to indicate; it might even be argued that De Sade was really a masochist; the investigation of histories of sadism and masochism, even those given by Krafft-Ebing (as, indeed, Colin Scott and Fere have already pointed out), constantly reveals traces of both groups of phenomena in the same individual. They cannot, therefore, be regarded as opposed manifestations. This has been felt by some writers, who have, in consequence, proposed other names more clearly indicating the relationship of the phenomena. Fere speaks of sexual algophily[98]; he only applies the term to masochism; it might equally well be applied to sadism. Schrenck-Notzing, to cover both sadism and masochism, has invented the term algolagnia (algos, pain, and lagnos sexually excited), and calls the former active, the latter passive, algolagnia.[99] Eulenburg has also emphasized the close connection between these groups of perverted sexual manifestations, and has adopted the same terms, adding the further group of ideal (illusionary) algolagnia, to cover the cases in which the mere autosuggestive representation of pain, inflicted or suffered, suffices to give sexual gratification.[100]

A brief discussion of the terms "sadism" and "masochism" has imposed itself upon us at this point because as soon as, in any study of the relationship between love and pain, we pass over the limits of normal manifestations into a region which is more or less abnormal, these two conceptions are always brought before us, and it was necessary to show on what grounds they are here rejected as the pivots on which the discussion ought to turn. We may accept them as useful terms to indicate two groups of clinical phenomena; but we cannot regard them as of any real scientific value. Having reached this result, we may continue our consideration of the love-bite, as the normal manifestation of the connection between love and pain which most naturally leads us across the frontier of the abnormal.

The result of the love-bite in its extreme degree is to shed blood. This cannot be regarded as the direct aim of the bite in its normal manifestations, for the mingled feelings of close contact, of passionate gripping, of symbolic devouring, which constitute the emotional accompaniments of the bite would be too violently discomposed by actual wounding and real shedding of blood. With some persons, however, perhaps more especially women, the love-bite is really associated with a conscious desire, even if more or less restrained, to draw blood, a real delight in this process, a love of blood. Probably this only occurs in persons who are not absolutely normal, but on the borderland of the abnormal. We have to admit that this craving has, however, a perfectly normal basis. There is scarcely any natural object with so profoundly emotional an effect as blood, and it is very easy to understand why this should be so.[101] Moreover, blood enters into the sphere of courtship by virtue of the same conditions by which cruelty enters into it; they are both accidents of combat, and combat is of the very essence of animal and primitive human courtship, certainly its most frequent accompaniment. So that the repelling or attracting fascination of blood may be regarded as a by-product of normal courtship, which, like other such by-products, may become an essential element of abnormal courtship.[102]

Normally the fascination of blood, if present at all during sexual excitement, remains more or less latent, either because it is weak or because the checks that inhibit it are inevitably very powerful. Occasionally it becomes more clearly manifest, and this may happen early in life. Fere records the case of a man of Anglo-Saxon origin, of sound heredity so far as could be ascertained and presenting no obvious stigmata of degeneration, who first experienced sexual manifestations at the age of 5 when a boy cousin was attacked by bleeding at the nose. It was the first time he had seen such a thing and he experienced erection and much pleasure at the sight. This was repeated the next time the cousin's nose bled and also whenever he witnessed any injuries or wounds, especially when occurring in males. A few years later he began to find pleasure in pinching and otherwise inflicting slight suffering. This sadism was not, however, further developed, although a tendency to inversion persisted.[103]

   Somewhat similar may have been the origin of the attraction of
   blood in a case which has been reported to me of a youth of 17,
   the youngest of a large family who are all very strong and
   entirely normal. He is himself, however, delicate, overgrown,
   with a narrow chest, a small head, and babyish features, while
   mentally he is backward, with very defective memory and scant
   powers of assimilation. He is intensely nervous, peevish, and
   subject to fits of childish rage. He takes violent fancies to
   persons of his own sex. But he appears to have only one way of
   obtaining sexual excitement and gratification. It is his custom
   to get into a hot bath and there to produce erection and
   emission, not by masturbation, but by thinking of flowing blood.
   He does not associate himself with the causation of this
   imaginary flow of blood; he is merely the passive but pleased
   spectator. He is aware of his peculiarity and endeavors to shake
   it off, but his efforts to obtain normal pleasure by thinking of
   a girl are vain.
   I may here narrate a case which has been communicated to me of
   algolagnia in a woman, combined with sexual hyperesthesia.
   R.D., aged 25, married, and of good social position; she is a
   small and dark woman, restless and alert in manner. She has one
   child.
   She has practised masturbation from an early age--ever since she
   can remember--by the method of external friction and pressure.
   From the age of 17 she was able (and is still) to produce the
   orgasm almost without effort, by calling up the image of any man
   who had struck her fancy. She has often done so while seated
   talking to such a man, even when he is almost a stranger; in
   doing it, she says, a tightening of the muscles of the thighs and
   the slightest movement are sufficient. Ugly men (if not
   deformed), as well as men with the reputation of being _roues_,
   greatly excite her sexually, more especially if of good social
   position, though this is not essential.
   At the age of 18 she became hysterical, probably, she herself
   believes, in consequence of a great increase at that time of
   indulgence in masturbation. The doctors, apparently suspecting
   her habits, urged her parents to get her married early. She
   married, at the age of 20, a man about twice her own age.
   As a child (and in a less degree still) she was very fond of
   watching dog-fights. This spectacle produced strong sexual
   feelings and usually orgasm, especially if much blood was shed
   during the fight. Clean cuts and wounds greatly attract her,
   whether on herself or a man. She has frequently slightly cut or
   scratched herself "to see the blood," and likes to suck the
   wound, thinking the taste "delicious." This produces strong
   sexual feelings and often orgasm, especially if at the time she
   thinks of some attractive man and imagines that she is sucking
   his blood. The sight of injury to a woman only very slightly
   affects her, and that, she thinks, only because of an involuntary
   association of ideas. Nor has the sight of suffering in illness
   any exciting effects, only that which is due to violence, and
   when there is a visible cause for the suffering, such as cuts and
   wounds. (Bruises, from the absence of blood, have only a slight
   effect.) The excitement is intensified if she imagines that she
   has herself inflicted the injury. She likes to imagine that the
   man wished to rape her, and that she fought him in order to make
   him more greatly value her favor, so wounding him.
   Impersonal ideas of torture also excite her. She thinks Fox's
   _Book of Martyrs_ "lovely," and the more horrible and bloody the
   tortures described the greater is the sexual excitement produced.
   The book excites her from the point of view of the torturer, not
   that of the victim. She has frequently masturbated while reading
   it.
   So far as practicable she has sought to carry out these ideas in
   her relations with her husband. She has several times bitten him
   till the blood came and sucked the bite during coitus. She likes
   to bite him enough to make him wince. The pleasure is greatly
   heightened by thinking of various tortures, chiefly by cutting.
   She likes to have her husband talk to her, and she to him, of all
   the tortures they could inflict on each other. She has, however,
   never actually tried to carry out these tortures. She would like
   to, but dares not, as she is sure he could not endure them. She
   has no desire for her husband to try them on her, although she
   likes to hear him talk about it.
   She is at the same time fond of normal coitus, even to excess.
   She likes her husband to remain entirely passive during
   connection, so that he can continue in a state of strong erection
   for a long time. She can thus, she says, procure for herself the
   orgasm a number of times in succession, even nine or ten, quite
   easily. On one occasion she even had the orgasm twenty-six times
   within about one and a quarter hours, her husband during this
   time having two orgasms. (She is quite certain about the accuracy
   of this statement.) During this feat much talk about torture was
   indulged in, and it took place after a month's separation from
   her husband, during which she was careful not to masturbate, so
   that she might have "a real good time" when he came back. She
   acknowledges that on this occasion she was a "complete wreck" for
   a couple of days afterward, but states that usually ten or a
   dozen orgasms (or spasms, as she terms them) only make her "feel
   lively." She becomes frenzied with excitement during intercourse
   and insensible to everything but the pleasure of it.
   She has never hitherto allowed anyone (except her husband after
   marriage) to know of her sadistic impulses, nor has she carried
   them out with anyone, though she would like to, if she dared. Nor
   has she allowed any man but her husband to have connection with
   her or to take any liberties.

Outbursts of sadism may occur episodically in fairly normal persons. Thus, Coutagne describes the case of a lad of 17--always regarded as quite normal, and without any signs of degeneracy, even on careful examination, or any traces of hysteria or alcoholism, though there was insanity among his cousins--who had had occasional sexual relations for a year or two, and on one occasion, being in a state of erection, struck the girl three times on the breast and abdomen with a kitchen knife bought for the purpose. He was much ashamed of his act immediately afterward, and, all the circumstances being taken into consideration, he was acquitted by the court.[104] Here we seem to have the obscure and latent fascination of blood, which is almost normal, germinating momentarily into an active impulse which is distinctly abnormal, though it produced little beyond those incisions which Vatsyayana disapproved of, but still regarded as a part of courtship. One step more and we are amid the most outrageous and extreme of all forms of sexual perversion: with the heroes of De Sade's novels, who, in exemplification of their author's most cherished ideals, plan scenes of debauchery in which the flowing of blood is an essential element of coitus; with the Marshall Gilles de Rais and the Hungarian Countess Bathory, whose lust could only be satiated by the death of innumerable victims.

   This impulse to stab--with no desire to kill, or even in most
   cases to give pain, but only to draw blood and so either
   stimulate or altogether gratify the sexual impulse--is no doubt
   the commonest form of sanguinary sadism. These women-stabbers
   have been known in France as _piqueurs_ for nearly a century, and
   in Germany are termed _Stecher_ or _Messerstecher_ (they have
   been studied by Naecke, "Zur Psychologie der sadistischen
   Messerstecher," _Archiv fuer Kriminal-Anthropologie_, Bd. 35,
   1909). A case of this kind where a man stabbed girls in the
   abdomen occurred in Paris in the middle of the eighteenth
   century, and in 1819 or 1820 there seems to have been an epidemic
   of _piqueurs_ in Paris; as we learn from a letter of Charlotte
   von Schiller's to Knebel; the offenders (though perhaps there was
   only one) frequented the Boulevards and the Palais Royal and
   stabbed women in the buttocks or thighs; they were never caught.
   About the same time similar cases of a slighter kind occurred in
   London, Brussels, Hamburg, and Munich.
   Stabbers are nearly always men, but cases of the same perversion
   in women are not unknown. Thus Dr. Kiernan informs me of an Irish
   woman, aged 40, and at the beginning of the menopause, who, in
   New York in 1909, stabbed five men with a hatpin. The motive was
   sexual and she told one of the men that she stabbed him because
   she "loved" him.
   Gilles de Rais, who had fought beside Joan of Arc, is the classic
   example of sadism in its extreme form, involving the murder of
   youths and maidens. Bernelle considers that there is some truth
   in the contention of Huysmans that the association with Joan of
   Arc was a predisposing cause in unbalancing Gilles de Rais.
   Another cause was his luxurious habit of life. He himself, no
   doubt rightly, attached importance to the suggestions received in
   reading Suetonius. He appears to have been a sexually precocious
   child, judging from an obscure passage in his confessions. He was
   artistic and scholarly, fond of books, of the society of learned
   men, and of music. Bernelle sums him up as "a pious warrior, a
   cruel and keen artist, a voluptuous assassin, an exalted mystic,"
   who was at the same time unbalanced, a superior degenerate, and
   morbidly impulsive. (The best books on Gilles de Rais are the
   Abbe Bossard's _Gilles de Rais_, in which, however, the author,
   being a priest, treats his subject as quite sane and abnormally
   wicked; Huysmans's novel, _La-Bas_, which embodies a detailed
   study of Gilles de Rais, and F.H. Bernelle's These de Paris, _La
   Psychose de Gilles de Rais_, 1910.)
   The opinion has been hazarded that the history of Gilles de Rais
   is merely a legend. This view is not accepted, but there can be
   no doubt that the sadistic manifestations which occurred in the
   Middle Ages were mixed up with legendary and folk-lore elements.
   These elements centered on the conception of the _werwolf_,
   supposed to be a man temporarily transformed into a wolf with
   blood-thirsty impulses. (See, e.g., articles "Werwolf" and
   "Lycanthropy" in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.) France, especially,
   was infested with werwolves in the sixteenth century. In 1603,
   however, it was decided at Bordeaux, in a trial involving a
   werwolf, that lycanthropy was only an insane delusion. Dumas
   ("Les Loup-Garous," _Journal de Psychologie Normale et
   Pathologique_, May-June, 1907) argues that the medieval werwolves
   were sadists whose crimes were largely imaginative, though
   sometimes real, the predecessor of the modern Jack the Ripper.
   The complex nature of the elements making up the belief in the
   werwolf is emphasized by Ernest Jones, _Der Alptraum_, 1912.
   Related to the werwolf, but distinct, was the _vampire_, supposed
   to be a dead person who rose from the dead to suck the blood of
   the living during sleep. By way of reprisal the living dug up,
   exorcised, and mutilated the supposed vampires. This was called
   vampirism. The name vampire was then transferred to the living
   person who had so treated a corpse. All profanation of the
   corpse, whatever its origin, is now frequently called vampirism
   (Epaulow, _Vampirisme_, These de Lyon, 1901; id., "Le Vampire du
   Muy," _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Sept., 1903). The
   earliest definite reference to necrophily is in Herodotus, who
   tells (bk. ii, ch. lxxxix) of an Egyptian who had connection with
   the corpse of a woman recently dead. Epaulow gives various old
   cases and, at full length, the case which he himself
   investigated, of Ardisson, the "Vampire du Muy." W.A.F. Browne
   also has an interesting article on "Necrophilism" (_Journal of
   Mental Science_, Jan., 1875) which he regards as atavistic. When
   there is, in addition, mutilation of the corpse, the condition is
   termed necrosadism. There seems usually to be no true sadism in
   either necrosadism or necrophilism. (See, however, Bloch,
   _Beitraege_, vol. ii, p. 284 et seq.)
   It must be said also that cases of rape followed by murder are
   quite commonly not sadistic. The type of such cases is
   represented by Soleilland, who raped and then murdered children.
   He showed no sadistic perversion. He merely killed to prevent
   discovery, as a burglar who is interrupted may commit murder in
   order to escape. (E. Dupre, "L'Affaire Soleilland," _Archives
   d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Jan.-Feb., 1910.)
   A careful and elaborate study of a completely developed sadist
   has been furnished by Lacassagne, Rousset, and Papillon
   ("L'Affaire Reidal," _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_,
   Oct.-Nov., 1907). Reidal, a youth of 18, a seminarist, was a
   congenital sanguinary sadist who killed another youth and was
   finally sent to an asylum. From the age of 4 he had voluptuous
   ideas connected with blood and killing, and liked to play at
   killing with other children. He was of infantile physical
   development, with a pleasant, childish expression of face, very
   religious, and hated obscenity and immorality. But the love of
   blood and murder was an irresistible obsession and its
   gratification produced immense emotional relief.
   Sadism generally has been especially studied by Lacassagne,
   _Vacher l'Eventreur et les Crimes Sadiques_, 1899. Zooesadism, or
   sadism toward animals, has been dealt with by P. Thomas, "Le
   Sadisme sur les Animaux," _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_,
   Sept., 1903. Auto-sadism, or "auto-erotic cruelty," that is to
   say, injuries inflicted on a person by himself with a sexual
   motive, has been investigated by G. Bach (_Sexuelle Verrirungen
   des Menschen und der Nature_, p. 427); this condition seems,
   however, a form of algolagnia more masochistic than sadistic in
   character.
   With regard to the medico-legal aspects, Kiernan ("Responsibility
   in Active Algophily," _Medicine_, April, 1903) sets forth the
   reasons in favor of the full and complete responsibility of
   sadists, and Harold Moyer comes to the same conclusion ("Is
   Sexual Perversion Insanity?" _Alienist and Neurologist_, May,
   1907). See also Thoinot's _Medico-legal Aspects of Moral
   Offenses_ (edited by Weysse, 1911), ch. xviii. While we are
   probably justified in considering the sadist as morally not
   insane in the technical sense, we must remember that he is, for
   the most part, highly abnormal from the outset. As Gaupp points
   out (_Sexual-Probleme_, Oct., 1909, p. 797), we cannot measure
   the influences which create the sadist and we must not therefore
   attempt to "punish" him, but we are bound to place him in a
   position where he will not injure society.

It is enough here to emphasize the fact that there is no solution of continuity in the links that bind the absolutely normal manifestations of sex with the most extreme violations of all human law. This is so true that in saying that these manifestations are violations of all human law we cannot go on to add, what would seem fairly obvious, that they are violations also of all natural law. We have but to go sufficiently far back, or sufficiently far afield, in the various zooelogical series to find that manifestations which, from the human point of view, are in the extreme degree abnormally sadistic here become actually normal. Among very various species wounding and rending normally take place at or immediately after coitus; if we go back to the beginning of animal life in the protozoa sexual conjugation itself is sometimes found to present the similitude, if not the actuality, of the complete devouring of one organism by another. Over a very large part of nature, as it has been truly said, "but a thin veil divides love from death."[105]

There is, indeed, on the whole, a point of difference. In that abnormal sadism which appears from time to time among civilized human beings it is nearly always the female who becomes the victim of the male. But in the normal sadism which occurs throughout a large part of nature it is nearly always the male who is the victim of the female. It is the male spider who impregnates the female at the risk of his life and sometimes perishes in the attempt; it is the male bee who, after intercourse with the queen, falls dead from that fatal embrace, leaving her to fling aside his entrails and calmly pursue her course.[106] If it may seem to some that the course of our inquiry leads us to contemplate with equanimity, as a natural phenomenon, a certain semblance of cruelty in man in his relations with woman, they may, if they will, reflect that this phenomenon is but a very slight counterpoise to that cruelty which has been naturally exerted by the female on the male long even before man began to be.


Original footnotes

[edit]

[83] Krafft-Ebing, _Psychopathia Sexualis_, English translation of tenth German edition, pp. 80, 209. It should be added that the object of the sadistic impulse is not necessarily a person of the opposite sex.

[84] A. Moll, _Die Kontraere Sexualempfindung_, third edition, 1899, p. 309.

[85] Fere, _L'Instinct Sexuel_, p. 133.

[86] P. Garnier, "Des Perversions Sexuelles," Thirteenth International Congress of Medicine, Section of Psychiatry, Paris, 1900.

[87] E. Duehren, _Der Marquis de Sade und Seine Zeit_, third edition, 1901, p. 449.

[88] See, for instance, Bloch's _Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis_, part ii, p. 178.

[89] Krafft-Ebing, _Psychopathia Sexualis_, English translation of tenth German edition, p. 115. Stefanowsky, who also discussed this condition (_Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle_, May, 1892, and translation, with notes by Kiernan, _Alienist and Neurologist_, Oct., 1892), termed it passivism.

[90] _Anatomy of Melancholy_, part iii, section 2, mem. iii, subs, 1.

[91] "Aristoteles als Masochist," _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Bd. ii, ht. 2.

[92] _Die Kontraere Sexualempfindung_, third edition, p. 277. Cf. C.F. von Schlichtegroll, _Sacher-Masoch und der Masochismus_, p. 120.

[93] See C.F. von Schlichtegroll, loc. cit., p. 124 et seq.

[94] Iwan Bloch considers that it is the commonest of all sexual perversions, more prevalent even than homosexuality.

[95] It has no doubt been prominent in earlier civilization. A very pronounced masochist utterance may be found in an ancient Egyptian love-song written about 1200 B.C.: "Oh! were I made her porter, I should cause her to be wrathful with me. Then when I did but hear her voice, the voice of her anger, a child shall I be for fear." (Wiedemann, _Popular Literature in Ancient Egypt_, p. 9.) The activity and independence of the Egyptian women at the time may well have offered many opportunities to the ancient Egyptian masochist.

[96] Colin Scott, "Sex and Art," _American Journal of Psychology_, vol. vii, No. 2, p. 208.

[97] It must not be supposed that the attraction of fur or of the whip is altogether accounted for by such a casual early experience as in Sacher-Masoch's case served to evoke it. The whip we shall have to consider briefly later on. The fascination exerted by fur, whether manifesting itself as love or fear, would appear to be very common in many children, and almost instinctive. Stanley Hall, in his "Study of Fears" (_American Journal of Psychology_, vol. viii, p. 213) has obtained as many as 111 well-developed cases of fear of fur, or, as he terms it, doraphobia, in some cases appearing as early as the age of 6 months, and he gives many examples. He remarks that the love of fur is still more common, and concludes that "both this love and fear are so strong and instinctive that they can hardly be fully accounted for without recourse to a time when association with animals was far closer than now, or perhaps when our remote ancestors were hairy." (Cf. "Erotic Symbolism," iv, in the fifth volume of these _Studies_.)

[98] Fere, _L'Instinct Sexuel_, p. 138.

[99] Schrenck-Notzing, _Zeitschrift fuer Hypnotismus_, Bd. ix, ht. 2, 1899.

[100] Eulenburg, _Sadismus und Masochismus_, second edition, 1911, p. 5.

[101] I have elsewhere dealt with this point in discussing the special emotional tone of red (Havelock Ellis, "The Psychology of Red," _Popular Science Monthly_, August and September, 1900).

[102] It is probable that the motive of sexual murders is nearly always to shed blood, and not to cause death. Leppmann (_Bulletin Internationale de Droit Penal_, vol. vi, 1896, p. 115) points out that such murders are generally produced by wounds in the neck or mutilation of the abdomen, never by wounds of the head. T. Claye Shaw, who terms the lust for blood hemothymia, has written an interesting and suggestive paper ("A Prominent Motive in Murder," _Lancet_, June 19, 1909) on the natural fascination of blood. Blumroeder, in 1830, seems to have been the first who definitely called attention to the connection between lust and blood.

[103] Fere, _Revue de Chirurgie_, March 10, 1905.

[104] H. Coutagne, "Cas de Perversion Sanguinaire de l'Instinct Sexuel," _Annales Medico-Psychologiques_, July and August, 1893. D.S. Booth (_Alienist and Neurologist_, Aug., 1906) describes the case of a man of neurotic heredity who slightly stabbed a woman with a penknife when on his way to a prostitute.

[105] Kiernan appears to have been the first to suggest the bearing of these facts on sadism, which he would regard as the abnormal human form of phenomena which may be found at the very beginning of animal life, as, indeed, the survival or atavistic reappearance of a primitive sexual cannibalism. See his "Psychological Aspects of the Sexual Appetite," _Alienist and Neurologist_, April, 1891, and "Responsibility in Sexual Perversion," _Chicago Medical Recorder_, March, 1892. Penta has also independently developed the conception of the biological basis of sadism and other sexual perversions (_I Pervertimenti Sessuali_, 1893). It must be added that, as Remy de Gourmont points out (_Promenades Philosophiques_, 2d series, p. 273), this sexual cannibalism exerted by the female may have, primarily, no erotic significance: "She eats him because she is hungry and because when exhausted he is an easy prey."

[106] In the chapter entitled "Le Vol Nuptial" of his charming book on the life of bees Maeterlinck has given an incomparable picture of the tragic courtship of these insects.