Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume Iii Part 8

[84]

A. Moll, Die Kontrare s.e.xualempfindung, third edition, 1899, p. 309.

[85]

Fere, L'Instinct s.e.xuel, p. 133.

[86]

P. Garnier, "Des Perversions s.e.xuelles," Thirteenth International Congress of Medicine, Section of Psychiatry, Paris, 1900.

[87]

E. Duhren, Der Marquis de Sade und Seine Zeit, third edition, 1901, p. 449.

[88]

See, for instance, Bloch's Beitrage zur aetiologie der Psychopathia s.e.xualis, part ii, p. 178.

[89]

Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia s.e.xualis, English translation of tenth German edition, p. 115. Stefanowsky, who also discussed this condition (Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle, May, 1892, and translation, with notes by Kiernan, Alienist and Neurologist, Oct., 1892), termed it pa.s.sivism.

[90]

Anatomy of Melancholy, part iii, section 2, mem. iii, subs, 1.

[91]

"Aristoteles als m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. ii, ht. 2.

[92]

Die Kontrare s.e.xualempfindung, third edition, p. 277. Cf. C. F. von Schlichtegroll, Sacher-Masoch und der Masochismus, p. 120.

[93]

See C. F. von Schlichtegroll, loc. cit., p. 124 et seq.

[94]

Iwan Bloch considers that it is the commonest of all s.e.xual perversions, more prevalent even than h.o.m.os.e.xuality.

[95]

It has no doubt been prominent in earlier civilization. A very p.r.o.nounced m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t utterance may be found in an ancient Egyptian love-song written about 1200 B.C.: "Oh! were I made her porter, I should cause her to be wrathful with me. Then when I did but hear her voice, the voice of her anger, a child shall I be for fear." (Wiedemann, Popular Literature in Ancient Egypt, p. 9.) The activity and independence of the Egyptian women at the time may well have offered many opportunities to the ancient Egyptian m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t.

[96]

Colin Scott, "s.e.x and Art," American Journal of Psychology, vol. vii, No. 2, p. 208.

[97]

It must not be supposed that the attraction of fur or of the whip is altogether accounted for by such a casual early experience as in Sacher-Masoch's case served to evoke it. The whip we shall have to consider briefly later on. The fascination exerted by fur, whether manifesting itself as love or fear, would appear to be very common in many children, and almost instinctive. Stanley Hall, in his "Study of Fears" (American Journal of Psychology, vol. viii, p. 213) has obtained as many as 111 well-developed cases of fear of fur, or, as he terms it, doraphobia, in some cases appearing as early as the age of 6 months, and he gives many examples. He remarks that the love of fur is still more common, and concludes that "both this love and fear are so strong and instinctive that they can hardly be fully accounted for without recourse to a time when a.s.sociation with animals was far closer than now, or perhaps when our remote ancestors were hairy." (Cf. "Erotic Symbolism," iv, in the fifth volume of these Studies.)

[98]

Fere, L'Instinct s.e.xuel, p. 138.

[99]

Schrenck-Notzing, Zeitschrift fur Hypnotismus, Bd. ix, ht. 2, 1899.

[100]

Eulenburg, Sadismus und Masochismus, second edition, 1911, p. 5.

[101]

I have elsewhere dealt with this point in discussing the special emotional tone of red (Havelock Ellis, "The Psychology of Red," Popular Science Monthly, August and September, 1900).

[102]

It is probable that the motive of s.e.xual murders is nearly always to shed blood, and not to cause death. Leppmann (Bulletin Internationale de Droit Penal, vol. vi, 1896, p. 115) points out that such murders are generally produced by wounds in the neck or mutilation of the abdomen, never by wounds of the head. T. Claye Shaw, who terms the l.u.s.t for blood hemothymia, has written an interesting and suggestive paper ("A Prominent Motive in Murder," Lancet, June 19, 1909) on the natural fascination of blood. Blumroder, in 1830, seems to have been the first who definitely called attention to the connection between l.u.s.t and blood.

[103]

Fere, Revue de Chirurgie, March 10, 1905.

[104]

H. Coutagne, "Cas de Perversion Sanguinaire de l'Instinct s.e.xuel," Annales Medico-Psychologiques, July and August, 1893. D. S. Booth (Alienist and Neurologist, Aug., 1906) describes the case of a man of neurotic heredity who slightly stabbed a woman with a penknife when on his way to a prost.i.tute.

[105]

Kiernan appears to have been the first to suggest the bearing of these facts on sadism, which he would regard as the abnormal human form of phenomena which may be found at the very beginning of animal life, as, indeed, the survival or atavistic reappearance of a primitive s.e.xual cannibalism. See his "Psychological Aspects of the s.e.xual Appet.i.te," Alienist and Neurologist, April, 1891, and "Responsibility in s.e.xual Perversion," Chicago Medical Recorder, March, 1892. Penta has also independently developed the conception of the biological basis of sadism and other s.e.xual perversions (I Pervertimenti Sessuali, 1893). It must be added that, as Remy de Gourmont points out (Promenades Philosophiques, 2d series, p. 273), this s.e.xual cannibalism exerted by the female may have, primarily, no erotic significance: "She eats him because she is hungry and because when exhausted he is an easy prey."

[106]

In the chapter ent.i.tled "Le Vol Nuptial" of his charming book on the life of bees Maeterlinck has given an incomparable picture of the tragic courtship of these insects.

III.

Flagellation as a Typical Ill.u.s.tration of Algolagnia-Causes of Connection between s.e.xual Emotion and Whipping-Physical Causes-Psychic Causes probably more Important-The Varied Emotional a.s.sociations of Whipping-Its Wide Prevalence.

The whole problem of love and pain, in its complementary s.a.d.i.s.tic and m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic aspects, is presented to us in connection with the pleasure sometimes experienced in whipping, or in being whipped, or in witnessing or thinking about scenes of whipping. The a.s.sociation of s.e.xual emotion with bloodshed is so extreme a perversion, it so swiftly sinks to phases that are obviously cruel, repulsive, and monstrous in an extreme degree, that it is necessarily rare, and those who are afflicted by it are often more or less imbecile. With whipping it is otherwise. Whipping has always been a recognized religious penance; it is still regarded as a beneficial and harmless method of chastis.e.m.e.nt; there is nothing necessarily cruel, repulsive, or monstrous in the idea or the reality of whipping, and it is perfectly easy and natural for an interest in the subject to arise in an innocent and even normal child, and thus to furnish a germ around which, temporarily at all events, s.e.xual ideas may crystallize. For these reasons the connection between love and pain may be more clearly brought out in connection with whipping than with blood.

There is, by no means, any necessary connection between flagellation and the s.e.xual emotions. If there were, this form of penance would not have been so long approved or at all events tolerated by the Church.[107]

As a matter of fact, indeed, it was not always approved or even tolerated. Pope Adrian IV in the eighth century forbade priests to beat their penitents, and at the time of the epidemic of flagellation in the thirteenth century, which was highly approved by many holy men, the abuses were yet so frequent that Clement VI issued a bull against these processions. All such papal prohibitions remained without effect. The a.s.sociation of religious flagellation with perverted s.e.xual motives is shown by its condemnation in later ages by the Inquisition, which was accustomed to prosecute the priests who, in prescribing flagellation as a penance, exerted it personally, or caused it to be inflicted on the stripped penitent in his presence, or made a woman penitent discipline him, such offences being regarded as forms of "solicitation."[108] There seems even to be some reason to suppose that the religious flagellation mania which was so prevalent in the later Middle Ages, when processions of penitents, male and female, eagerly flogged themselves and each other, may have had something to do with the discovery of erotic flagellation,[109] which, at all events in Europe, seems scarcely to have been known before the sixteenth century. It must, in any case, have a.s.sisted to create a predisposition. The introduction of flagellation as a definitely recognized s.e.xual stimulant is by Eulenburg, in his interesting book, Sadismus und Masochismus, attributed to the Arabian physicians. It would appear to have been by the advice of an Arabian physician that the d.u.c.h.ess Leonora Gonzaga, of Mantua, was whipped by her mother to aid her in responding more warmly to her husband's embraces and to conceive.

Whatever the precise origin of s.e.xual flagellation in Europe, there can be no doubt that it soon became extremely common, and so it remains at the present day. Those who possess a special knowledge of such matters declare that s.e.xual flagellation is the most frequent of all s.e.xual perversions in England.[110] This belief is, I know, shared by many people both inside and outside England. However this may be, the tendency is certainly common. I doubt if it is any or at all less common in Germany, judging by the large number of books on the subject of flagellation which have been published in German. In a catalogue of "interesting books" on this and allied subjects issued by a German publisher and bookseller, I find that, of fifty-five volumes, as many as seventeen or eighteen, all in German, deal solely with the question of flagellation, while many of the other books appear to deal in part with the same subject.[111] It is, no doubt, true that the large part which the rod has played in the past history of our civilization justifies a considerable amount of scientific interest in the subject of flagellation, but it is clear that the interest in these books is by no means always scientific, but very frequently s.e.xual.

It is remarkable that, while the s.e.xual a.s.sociations of whipping, whether in slight or in marked degrees, are so frequent in modern times, they appear to be by no means easy to trace in ancient times. "Flagellation," I find it stated by a modern editor of the Priapeia, "so extensively practised in England as a provocation to venery, is almost entirely unnoticed by the Latin erotic writers, although, in the Satyricon of Petronius (ch. cx.x.xviii), Encolpius, in describing the steps taken by nothea to undo the temporary impotence to which he was subjected, says: 'Next she mixed nasturtium-juice with southern wood, and, having bathed my foreparts, she took a bunch of green nettles, and gently whipped my belly all over below the navel.'" It appears also that many ancient courtesans dedicated to Venus as ex-votos a whip, a bridle, or a spur as tokens of their skill in riding their lovers. The whip was sometimes used in antiquity, but if it aroused s.e.xual emotions they seem to have pa.s.sed unregarded. "We naturally know nothing," Eulenburg remarks (Sadismus und Masochismus, p. 72), "of the feelings of the priestess of Artemis at the flagellation of Spartan youths; or what emotions inspired the priestess of the Syrian G.o.ddess under similar circ.u.mstances; or what the Roman Pontifex Maximus felt when he castigated the exposed body of a negligent vestal (as described by Plutarch) behind a curtain, and the 'plagosus...o...b..lius' only practised on children."

It was at the Renaissance that cases of abnormal s.e.xual pleasure in flagellation began to be recorded. The earliest distinct reference to a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic flagellant seems to have been made by Pico della Mirandola, toward the end of the fifteenth century, in his Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem, bk. iii, ch. xxvii. Clius Rhodiginus in 1516, again, narrated the case of a man he knew who liked to be severely whipped, and found this a stimulant to coitus. Otto Brunfels, in his Onomasticon (1534), art. "Coitus," refers to another case of a man who could not have intercourse with his wife until he had been whipped. Then, a century later, in 1643, Meibomius wrote De Usu Flagrorum in re Venerea, the earliest treatise on this subject, narrating various cases. Numerous old cases of pleasure in flagellation and urtication were brought together by Schurig in 1720 in his Spermatologia, pp. 253-258.

The earliest definitely described medical case of s.a.d.i.s.tic pleasure in the sight of active whipping which I have myself come across belongs to the year 1672, and occurs in a letter in which Nesterus seeks the opinion of Garmann. He knows intimately, he states, a very learned man-whose name, for the honor he bears him, he refrains from mentioning-who, whenever in a school or elsewhere he sees a boy unbreeched and birched, and hears him crying out, at once emits s.e.m.e.n copiously without any erection, but with great mental commotion. The same accident frequently happens to him during sleep, accompanied by dreams of whipping. Nesterus proceeds to mention that this "laudatus vir" was also extremely sensitive to the odor of strawberries and other fruits, which produced nausea. He was evidently a neurotic subject. (L. C. F. Garmanni et Aliorum Virorum Clarissimorum, Epistolarum Centuria, Rostochi et Lipsiae, 1714.)

In England we find that toward the end of the sixteenth century one of Marlowe's epigrams deals with a certain Francus who before intercourse with his mistress "sends for rods and strips himself stark naked," and by the middle of the seventeenth century the existence of an a.s.sociation between flagellation and s.e.xual pleasure seems to have been popularly recognized. In 1661, in a vulgar "tragicomedy" ent.i.tled The Presbyterian Lash, we find: "I warrant he thought that the tickling of the wench's b.u.t.tocks with the rod would provoke her to lechery." That whipping was well known as a s.e.xual stimulant in England in the eighteenth century is sufficiently indicated by the fact that in one of Hogarth's series representing the "Harlot's Progress" a birch rod hangs over the bed. The prevalence of s.e.xual flagellation in England at the end of that century and the beginning of the nineteenth is discussed by Duhren (Iwan Bloch) in his Geschlechtsleben in England (1901-3), especially vol. ii, ch. vi.

While, however, the evidence regarding s.e.xual flagellation is rare, until recent times whipping as a punishment was extremely common. It is even possible that its very prevalence, and the consequent familiarity with which it was regarded, were unfavorable to the development of any mysterious emotional state likely to act on the s.e.xual sphere, except in markedly neurotic subjects. Thus, the corporal chastis.e.m.e.nt of wives by husbands was common and permitted. Not only was this so to a proverbial extent in eastern Europe, but also in the extreme west and among a people whose women enjoyed much freedom and honor. Cymric law allowed a husband to chastise his wife for angry speaking, such as calling him a cur; for giving away property she was not ent.i.tled to give away; or for being found in hiding with another man. For the first two offenses she had the option of paying him three kine. When she accepted the chastis.e.m.e.nt she was to receive "three strokes with a rod of the length of her husband's forearm and the thickness of his long finger, and that wheresoever he might will, excepting on the head"; so that she was to suffer pain only, and not injury. (R. B. Holt, "Marriage Laws and Customs of the Cymri," Journal of the Anthropological Inst.i.tute, August-November, 1898, p. 162.)

"The Cymric law," writes a correspondent, "seems to have survived in popular belief in the Eastern and Middle States of the United States. In police-courts in New York, for example, it has been unsuccessfully pleaded that a man is ent.i.tled to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb. In Pennsylvania actual acquittals have been rendered."

Among all cla.s.ses children were severely whipped by their parents and others in authority over them. It may be recalled that in the twelfth century when Abelard became tutor to Heloise, then about 18 years of age, her uncle authorized him to beat her, if negligent in her studies. Even in the sixteenth century Jeanne d'Albert, who became the mother of Henry IV of France, at the age of 13 was married to the Duke of Cleves, and to overcome her resistance to this union the Queen, her mother, had her whipped to such an extent that she thought she would die of it. The whip on this occasion was, however, only partially successful, for the Duke never succeeded in consummating the marriage, which was, in consequence, annulled. (Cabanes brings together numerous facts regarding the prevalence of flagellation as a chastis.e.m.e.nt in ancient France in the interesting chapter on "La Flagellation a la Cour et a la Ville" in his Indiscretions de l'Histoire, 1903.)

As to the prevalence of whipping in England evidence is furnished by Andrews, in the chapter on "Whipping and Whipping Posts," in his book on ancient punishments. It existed from the earliest times and was administered for a great variety of offenses, to men and women alike, for vagrancy, for theft, to the fathers and mothers of illegitimate children, for drunkenness, for insanity, even sometimes for small-pox. At one time both s.e.xes were whipped naked, but from Queen Elizabeth's time only from the waist upward. In 1791 the whipping of female vagrants ceased by law. (W. Andrews, Bygone Punishments, 1899.)

It must, however, be remarked that law always lags far behind social feeling and custom, and flagellation as a common punishment had fallen into disuse or become very perfunctory long before any change was made in the law, though it is not absolutely extinct, even by law, today. There is even an ignorant and retrograde tendency to revive it. Thus, even in severe Commonwealth days, the alleged whipping with rods of a servant-girl by her master, though with no serious physical injury, produced a great public outcry, as we see by the case of the Rev. Zachary Crofton, a distinguished London clergyman, who was prosecuted in 1657 on the charge of whipping his servant-girl, Mary Cadman, because she lay in bed late in the morning and stole sugar. This incident led to several pamphlets. In The Presbyterian, Lash or Noctroff's Maid Whipt (1661), a satire on Crofton, we read: "It is not only contrary to Gospel but good manners to take up a wench's petticoats, smock and all"; and in the doggerel ballad of "Bo-Peep," which was also written on the same subject, it is said that Crofton should have left his wife to chastise the maid. Crofton published two pamphlets, one under his own name and one under that of Alethes Noctroff (1657), in which he elaborately dealt with the charge as both false and frivolous. In one pa.s.sage he offers a qualified defense of such an act: "I cannot but bewail the exceeding rudeness of our times to suffer such foolery to be prosecuted as of some high and notorious crime. Suppose it were (as it is not) true, may not some eminent congregational brother be found guilty of the same act? Is it not much short of drinking an health naked on a signpost? May it not be as theologically defended as the husband's correction of his wife?" This pa.s.sage, and the whole episode, show that feeling in regard to this matter was at that time in a state of transition.