that young men between 16 and 20 give themselves up to daily self-abuse without weakening their appetite for women. They love boys and practice mutual self-abuse with persons of their own sex; yet they crave all the while for women. Of the many who live thus during the years of adolescence, some have undoubtedly as bad a family record as the worst of Krafft-Ebing's cases show. Finally, as regards the onanism which is a marked characteristic of some adult Urnings, this must be ascribed in most cases to the repression of their abnormal instincts. They adopt the habit, as Krafft-Ebing himself says, faute de mieux.[1]
In justice to the theory I am criticising, it ought to be remarked that Krafft-Ebing does not contend that wherever hereditary taint and onanism concur, the result will be sexual inversion; but rather that wherever we have diagnosed an acquired form of sexual inversion, we shall discover hereditary taint and onanism. Considering the frequency of both hereditary taint and onanism in our civilisation, this is not risking much.
- ↑ Without having recourse to Ulrichs, it may be demonstrated from Krafft-Ebing's own cases of genuine Urnings that early onanism is by no means more frequent among them than among normal males. Five marked specimens showed no inclination for self-abuse. The first (p. 128) says: "As I never masturbated and felt no inclination for it, I sometimes had a nocturnal pollution." The second (p. 155): "You will be surprised to hear that before my twenty-eighth year I never had any ejaculation of semen, either by nocturnal emissions, or by masturbation, or by contact with a man." The third (p. 172): "Onanism is a miserable makeshift, and pernicious, whereas homosexual love elevates the moral and strengthens the physical nature." The fourth (p. 163): "I had an internal horror of onanism, although from the very first appearance of puberty I
