Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume Iii Part 7

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 a.s.sociated 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 pa.s.ses over into the region of the morbid. It is an instance that enables us to realize how even the most terrible and repugnant s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual emotion a.s.sociated 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 s.e.x, and the coloring of the idea of such acts with l.u.s.tful feeling."[83] A more complete definition is that of Moll, who describes sadism as a condition in which "the s.e.xual 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 a.s.sociation of violence and cruelty with s.e.xual enjoyment, such violence or cruelty not being necessarily exerted by the person himself who seeks s.e.xual pleasure in this a.s.sociation."[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 s.e.xual perversion characterized by a close connection between suffering inflicted or mentally represented and the s.e.xual o.r.g.a.s.m, 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 s.e.xual perversions which are displayed in De Sade's novels. Iwan Bloch ("Eugen Duhren"), 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 s.e.xual excitement and s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 n.o.ble, 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 sc.r.a.pes, of which the details are unknown, and his father sought to marry him to the daughter of an aristocratic friend of his own, a n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sion 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 n.o.bles and sometimes among coa.r.s.ely 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 pa.s.sed 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 prost.i.tutes at Ma.r.s.eilles. 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 const.i.tute a sort of encyclopedia of s.e.xual perversions, an eighteenth century Psychopathia s.e.xualis, and embody, at the same time, a philosophy. He was the first, Bloch remarks, who realized the immense importance of the s.e.xual question. His general att.i.tude may be ill.u.s.trated by the following pa.s.sage (as quoted by Laca.s.sagne): "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 G.o.ds, your h.e.l.l, 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 att.i.tude 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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 Duhren (Iwan Bloch), Der Marquis de Sade und Seine Zeit, third edition, 1901; id., Neue Forschungen uber den Marquis de Sade und Seine Zeit, 1904; Laca.s.sagne, 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 s.e.xual 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 a.s.sociated 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 s.a.d.i.s.tic 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 s.e.xually. 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 pa.s.sivity, 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 pa.s.sions. 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 s.a.d.i.s.ts 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 s.a.d.i.s.tic murderer, was timid, modest, and delicate; he was too shy to urinate in the presence of other people. A s.a.d.i.s.tic zoophilist, 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 s.e.xual advances to women.

Kiernan and Moyer are inclined to connect the modesty and timidity of s.a.d.i.s.ts 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 s.e.xual perversion, which is usually considered the opposite of sadism. Masochism is commonly regarded as a peculiarly feminine s.e.xual perversion, in women, indeed, as normal in some degree, and in man as a sort of inversion of the normal masculine emotional att.i.tude, but this view of the matter is not altogether justified, for definite and p.r.o.nounced 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xualis in which the individual affected, in s.e.xual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite s.e.x, of being treated by this person as by a master, humiliated and abused. This idea is colored by s.e.xual feeling; the m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t 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 s.e.xual 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 cla.s.sic times various m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic phenomena are noted with approval by Ovid. It has been pointed out by Moll[92] that there are traces of m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic 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 pa.s.sion in its more lyric exaltations almost necessarily involves some resort to m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic 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 pa.s.sionate exaltation, to trample on him, certainly without any wish to suggest s.e.xual 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 p.r.o.nounced and characteristic m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic tendencies; and in more recent days m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic expressions have been noted as occurring in the love-letters of so emphatically virile a statesman as Bismarck.

Thus a minor degree of the m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic tendency may be said to be fairly common, while its more p.r.o.nounced manifestations are more common than p.r.o.nounced 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 m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic 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 pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.sive 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 att.i.tude 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 unp.r.o.nounced forms of the m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic tendency to the more definite forms in which it becomes an unquestionable s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 n.o.bleman, 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 n.o.ble 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 s.e.xual 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 p.u.b.erty 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 Xen.o.bia 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 a.s.sist 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 att.i.tude 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 Emissar, dealing with the Polish Revolution, he embodied the contradictory personality of Countess Xen.o.bia. 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 a.s.serted 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, Pa.s.sionsgeschichte 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 Rumelin, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Rumelin 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt, 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 a.s.sociated 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 s.a.d.i.s.t, as Bloch's careful definition is alone sufficient to indicate; it might even be argued that De Sade was really a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t; 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 s.e.xual 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 (?????, pain, and ?????? s.e.xually excited), and calls the former active, the latter pa.s.sive, algolagnia.[99] Eulenburg has also emphasized the close connection between these groups of perverted s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sionate gripping, of symbolic devouring, which const.i.tute 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 a.s.sociated 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 a.s.similation. He is intensely nervous, peevish, and subject to fits of childish rage. He takes violent fancies to persons of his own s.e.x. But he appears to have only one way of obtaining s.e.xual 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 a.s.sociate himself with the causation of this imaginary flow of blood; he is merely the pa.s.sive 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 s.e.xual 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 o.r.g.a.s.m 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 s.e.xually, 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 s.e.xual feelings and usually o.r.g.a.s.m, 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 s.e.xual feelings and often o.r.g.a.s.m, 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 a.s.sociation 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 b.l.o.o.d.y the tortures described the greater is the s.e.xual excitement produced. The book excites her from the point of view of the torturer, not that of the victim. She has frequently m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed 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 pa.s.sive 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 o.r.g.a.s.m a number of times in succession, even nine or ten, quite easily. On one occasion she even had the o.r.g.a.s.m twenty-six times within about one and a quarter hours, her husband during this time having two o.r.g.a.s.ms. (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 m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e, 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 o.r.g.a.s.ms (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 s.a.d.i.s.tic 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 s.e.xual 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 circ.u.mstances 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 s.e.xual 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 l.u.s.t 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 s.e.xual 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 Nacke, "Zur Psychologie der s.a.d.i.s.tischen Messerstecher," Archiv fur 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 b.u.t.tocks 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 s.e.xual 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 cla.s.sic 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 a.s.sociation 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 s.e.xually precocious child, judging from an obscure pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sa.s.sin, 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 s.a.d.i.s.tic 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 s.a.d.i.s.ts 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. lx.x.xix) 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, Beitrage, vol. ii, p. 284 et seq.)

It must be said also that cases of rape followed by murder are quite commonly not s.a.d.i.s.tic. The type of such cases is represented by Soleilland, who raped and then murdered children. He showed no s.a.d.i.s.tic 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 s.a.d.i.s.t has been furnished by Laca.s.sagne, Rousset, and Papillon ("L'Affaire Reidal," Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Oct.-Nov., 1907). Reidal, a youth of 18, a seminarist, was a congenital sanguinary s.a.d.i.s.t 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 Laca.s.sagne, Vacher l'Eventreur et les Crimes Sadiques, 1899. Zoosadism, 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 s.e.xual motive, has been investigated by G. Bach (s.e.xuelle Verrirungen des Menschen und der Nature, p. 427); this condition seems, however, a form of algolagnia more m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic than s.a.d.i.s.tic 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 s.a.d.i.s.ts, and Harold Moyer comes to the same conclusion ("Is s.e.xual 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 s.a.d.i.s.t 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 (s.e.xual-Probleme, Oct., 1909, p. 797), we cannot measure the influences which create the s.a.d.i.s.t 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 s.e.x 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 zoological series to find that manifestations which, from the human point of view, are in the extreme degree abnormally s.a.d.i.s.tic 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 s.e.xual 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.

[83]

Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia s.e.xualis, English translation of tenth German edition, pp. 80, 209. It should be added that the object of the s.a.d.i.s.tic impulse is not necessarily a person of the opposite s.e.x.