Science, and especially with the aid of Medicine, which studies the psychological subject at its anatomical and physiological source, and views it from all sides.
Perhaps it will be possible for medical science to gain a stand-point of philosophical knowledge midway between the despairing views of philosophers like Schopenhauer and Hartmann[1] and the gay, näive views of the poets.
It is not the intention of the author to lay the foundation of a psychology of the sexual life, though without doubt psychopathology would furnish many important sources of knowledge to psychology.
The purpose of this treatise is a description of the pathological manifestations of the sexual life and an attempt to refer them to their underlying conditions. The task is a difficult one, and, in spite of years of experience as alienist and medical jurist, I am well aware that what I can offer must be incomplete.
The importance of the subject for the welfare of society, especially forensically, demands, however, that it should be examined scientifically. Only he who, as a medico-legal expert, has been in a position where he has been compelled to pass judgment upon his fellow-men, where life, freedom, and honor were at stake, and realized painfully the incompleteness of our knowledge concerning the pathology of the sexual life, can fully understand the significance of an attempt to gain definite views concerning it.
Even at the present time, in the domain of sexual criminality, the most erroneous opinions are expressed and the most unjust sentences pronounced, influencing laws and public opinion.
He who makes the psychopathology of sexual life the object of scientific study sees himself placed on a dark side of human life and misery, in the shadows of which the god-like
- ↑ Hartmann's philosophical view of love, In the "Philosophy of the Unconscious," p. 583, Berlin, 1869, is the following: "Love causes more pain than pleasure. Pleasure is Illusory. Reason would cause love to be avoided if it were not for the fatal sexual instinct; therefore, it would be best for a man to have himself castrated." The same opinion, minus the consequence, is also expressed by Schopenhauer ("Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," 3. Aufl., Bd. ii, p. 586 u. ff.).
