bad intellectual powers or original eccentricity) are present, which may even go so far as pronounced conditions of mental degeneration (dementia, moral insanity).
In many urnings, either temporarily or permanently, insanity of a degenerative character (pathological emotional states, periodical insanity, paranoia, etc.) makes its appearance.
6. In almost all cases where an examination of the physical and mental peculiarities of the ancestors and blood-relations has been possible, neuroses, psychoses, degenerative signs, etc., have been found in the families.[1]
The depth of congenital contrary feeling is shown by the fact that the lustful dream of the male-loving urning has for its content only male individuals; that of the female-loving woman, only female individuals, with corresponding situations.
The observation of Westphal, that the consciousness of one congenitally defective in sexual desires toward the opposite sex is painfully affected by the impulse toward the same sex, is true in only a number of cases. Indeed, in many instances, the consciousness of the abnormality of the condition is wanting. The majority of urnings are happy in their perverse sexual feeling and impulse, and unhappy only in so far as social and legal barriers stand in the way of the satisfaction of their instinct toward their own sex.
The study of contrary sexual feeling points directly to anomalies of the cerebral organization of the affected individuals. Gley (Revue philosoph., January, 1884) believes that he is able to solve the riddle by the theory that the individuals have a female brain and male sexual glands; and, further, that pathological brain conditions determine the sexual life, while normally the sexual organs determine the sexual functions of the brain.
One of my patients offered me an interesting theory in
- ↑ Tarnowsky (op. cit., p. 34) records a case which shows that contrary sexual feeling, as a concomitant manifestation with neurotic degeneration, may also affect the descendants of parents having no neurotic taint. In this instance, lues of the parents played a part, as in a similar case of Scholz (Vierteljahrsschr. f. ger. Med.), in which the perversion of the sexual desires stood in causal relation with an arrest of psychical development, caused by traumatism.
