Psychopathia sexualis: With especial reference to contrary sexual instinct

abnormal sexual instinct. However, actual transitions to hermaphrodites never occur, but, on the contrary, completely differentiated genitals; so that, just as in all pathological perversions of the sexual life, the cause must be sought in the brain (androgyny and gynandry). The first definite communications[106] concerning this enigmatical phenomenon of Nature are made by Caspar (“Ueber Nothzucht und Päderastie,” Caspar’s _Vierteljahrsschrift_, 1852, i), who, it is true, classes it with pederasty, but makes the pertinent remark that this anomaly is, in most cases, congenital, and, at the same time, to be regarded as a mental hermaphroditism. There exists here an actual disgust of sexual contact with women, while the imagination is filled with beautiful young men, and with statues and pictures of them. It did not escape Casper that in such cases emissio penis in anum (pederasty) is not the rule, but that, by means of other sexual acts (mutual onanism), sexual satisfaction is sought and obtained. In his “Clinical Novels” (1863, p. 33) Casper gives the interesting confession of a man showing this perversion of the sexual instinct, and does not hesitate to assert that, aside from vicious imagination and vice, as a result of over-indulgence in normal sexual intercourse, there are numerous cases in which pederasty has its origin in a remarkable, obscure impulse, which is congenital and inexplicable. About the middle of the “sixties,” a certain assessor, Ulrichs, himself subject to this perverse instinct, came out and declared, in numerous articles,[107] that the sexual mental life was not connected with the bodily sex; that there were male individuals that felt like women toward men (“anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa”). He called these people “_urnings_,” and demanded nothing less than the legal and social recognition of this sexual love of the urnings as congenital and, therefore, as right; and the permission of marriage among them. Ulrichs failed, however, to prove that this certainly congenital and paradoxical sexual feeling was physiological, and not pathological. Griesinger (_Archiv f. Psychiatrie_, i, p. 651) threw the first ray of light on these facts, anthropologically and clinically, by pointing out the marked hereditary taint of the individual, in a case which came under his own observation. We have Westphal (_Archiv f. Psychiatrie_, ii, p. 73) to thank for the first systematic consideration of the manifestation in question, which he defined as “congenital reversal of the sexual feeling, with consciousness of the abnormality of the manifestation,” and designated with the name, since generally accepted, of _contrary sexual instinct_. At the same time, he began a series of cases,[108] which, up to this time, has reached ninety-three, those reported in this monograph not being included. Westphal leaves it undecided as to whether contrary sexual feeling is a symptom of a neuropathic or of a psychopathic condition, or whether it may occur as an isolated manifestation. He holds fast to the opinion that the condition is congenital. From the cases published up to 1877, I have designated this peculiar sexual feeling as a functional sign of degeneration, and as a partial manifestation of a neuro-psychopathic state, in most cases hereditary,—a supposition which has found renewed confirmation in a consideration of additional cases. The following peculiarities may be given as the signs of this neuro-psychopathic taint:—