chism" (_Op. cit._, pp. 127-130), the subject from
childhood indulged in voluptuous day-dreams in which he was the
slave of a beautiful mistress who would compel him to obey all
her caprices, stand over him with one foot on his breast, sit on
his face and body, make him wait on her in her bath, or when she
urinated, and sometimes insist on doing this on his face; though
a highly intellectual man, he was always too timid to attempt to
carry any of his ideas into execution; he had been troubled by
nocturnal enuresis up to the age of 20.
Neri, again (_Archivio delle Psicopatie Sessuali_, vol. i, fasc.
7 and 8, 1896), records the case of an Italian masochist who
experienced the greatest pleasure when both urination and
defecation were practiced in this manner by the woman he was
attached to.
In a previous volume of these _Studies_ ("Sexual Inversion,"
History XXVI) I have recorded the masochistic day-dreams of a boy
whose impulses were at the same time inverted; in his reveries
"the central fact," he states, "became the discharge of urine
from my lover over my body and limbs, or, if I were very fond of
him, I let it be in my face." In actual life the act of urination
casually witnessed in childhood became the symbol, even the
reality, of the central secret of sex: "I stood rooted and
flushing with downcast eyes till the act was over, and was
conscious for a considerable time of stammering speech and
bewildered faculties.... I was overwhelmed with emotion and could
barely drag my feet from the spot or my eyes from the damp
herbage where he had deposited the waters of secrecy. Even to-day
I cannot dissociate myself from the shuddering charm that moment
had for me."
It is not only the urine and the faeces which may thus acquire a symbolic
fascination and attractiveness under the influence of masochistic
deviations of sexual idealization. In some cases extreme rapture has been
experienced in licking sweating feet. There is, indeed, no excretion or
product of the body which has not been a source of ecstasy: the sweat from
every part of the body, the saliva and menstrual fluid, even the wax from
the ears.
Krafft-Ebing very truly points out (_Psychopathia Sexualis_,
English translation, p. 178) that this sexual scatalogic
symbolism is precisely paralleled by a religious scatalogic
symbolism. In
|