It would probably be difficult for the physician to find cases of feminine masochism. Subjective and objective restraints—modesty and custom—naturally constitute, in women, insurmountable obstacles to the expression of perverse sexual instinct. Thus it happens that, up to the present time, but one case of masochism in a woman has been scientifically established; and this is accompanied by circumstances that obscure it.
Case 73. Miss v. X., Russian, aged 35; of greatly predisposed family. For some years she has been in the initial stage of paranoia persecutoria. This sprang from cerebro-spinal neurasthenia, the origin of which is found to be sexual hyper-excitation. Since her twenty-fourth year she has been given to masturbation. As a result of disappointment in an engagement and intense sexual excitement, she began to practice masturbation and psychical onanism. Inclination toward persons of her own sex never occurred. The patient says: “At the age of six or eight I conceived a desire to be whipped. Since I had never been whipped, and had never been present when others were thus punished, I cannot understand how I came to have this strange desire. I can only think that it is congenital. With these ideas of being whipped I had a feeling of actual delight, and pictured in my fancy how fine it would be to be whipped by one of my female friends. I never had any thought of being whipped by a man. I reveled in the idea, and never attempted any actual realization of my fancies. These disappeared after my tenth year. Only when I read “Rousseau’s Confessions,” at the age of thirty-four, did I understand what my longing for whippings meant, and that my abnormal ideas were like those of Rousseau. Since my tenth year I have never had any more such fancies.”
On account of its original character and the reference to Rousseau, this case may with certainty be called a case of masochism. The fact that it is a female friend that is conceived in imagination as whipping her, is explained by the circumstance that the masochistic desire was here present in the mind of a child before the psychical vita sexualis had developed and the instinct for the male had been awakened. Contrary sexual instinct is here expressly excluded.
An Attempt to Explain Masochism.
The facts of masochism are certainly among the most interesting in the domain of psychopathology. An attempt to
