ea
of intercourse with animals had made it impossible for me to feel
the disgust with the practice which it inspires in most people;
and even the perusal of Exodus xxii: 19 failed to make me abandon
it. Firmly as I believed in the Mosaic law the supremacy of the
sexual impulse was complete.

As early as my sixteenth year I tried to abandon "self-abuse" in
all its forms and have repeatedly made the same effort since that
time but never with more than very partial success. On two or
three occasions I have stopped for periods of several weeks, but
only to begin again and indulge more recklessly than before. The
deep depression which followed each failure, and often each act
of masturbation, I attributed solely to the loss of semen,
leaving out of account the fact that I expected to feel depressed
and the utter discouragement and self-contempt which accompanied
the sense of failure and weakness when, in the face of my
resolution, I repeatedly gave way and yielded to the temptation
to an act whose consequences I firmly believed must be ruinous. I
am now convinced that by far the greater part of this depression
was due to suggestion and the humiliating sense of defeat. And
this feeling of moral impotence, this seeming helplessness
against an overpowering impulse which, on the other hand, seemed
so trivial when viewed without passion, eventually weakened my
self-control to a degree guessed by no one but myself and sapped
the foundations of my moral life in a way which I have constant
occasion to deplore.

The foregoing paragraphs give, I think, a fair idea of my
condition when I left home for a boarding school at the beginning
of my seventeenth year. From this time my experiences may be said
to have run on in two distinct cycles--that of the summer months
when I was at home, and that of the remainder of the year when I
was at school. This fact will make some confusion and apparent
inconsistency in the rest of this "history" unavoidable. When I
left home I was shy, retiring, totally ignorant of social usage,
without self-confidence, unambitious, dreamy, and subject to fits
of melancholy. I masturbated at least once a day, though I was in
almost constant rebellion against the habit. In my more idle
moments I elaborated erotic day dreams in which there was a
peculiar mixture of