ng life of the following day; he gives a typical case of
hysterical erotic dreaming in an uneducated servant-girl of 23, in whom
such dreams occur usually a few days before the menstrual period; her
dreams, especially if erotic, make an enormous impression on her; in the
morning she is bad-tempered if they were unpleasant, while she feels
lascivious and gives herself up to masturbation if she has had erotic
dreams of men; she then has a feeling of pleasure throughout the day, and
her sexual organs are bathed with moisture.[244] Pitres and Gilles de la
Tourette, two of Charcot's most distinguished pupils, in their elaborate
works on hysteria, both consider that dreams generally have a great
influence on the waking life of the hysterical, and they deal with the
special influence of erotic dreams, to which, doubtless, we must refer
those conceptions of _incubi_ and _succubi_ which played so vast and so
important a part in the demonology of the Middle Ages, and while not
unknown in men were most frequent in women. Such erotic dreams--as these
observers, confirming the experience of old writers, have found among the
hysterical to-day--are by no means always, or even usually, of a
pleasurable character. "It is very rare," Pitres remarks, when insisting
on the sexual character of the hallucinations of the hysterical, "for
these erotic hallucinations to be accompanied by agreeable voluptuous
sensations. In most cases the illusion of sexual intercourse even provokes
acute pain. The witches of old times nearly all affirmed that in their
relations with the devil they suffered greatly.[245] They said that his
organ was long and rough and pointed, with scales which lifted on
withdrawal and tore the vagina." (It seems probable, I may remark, that
the witches' representations, both of the devil and of sexual intercourse,
were largely influenced by familiarity with the coupling of animals). As
Gilles de la Tourette is careful to warn his readers, we must not too
hastily assume, from the prevalence of nocturnal auto-erotic phenomena in
hysterical women, that such women are necessarily sexual and libidinous in
excess; the disorder is in them psychic, he points out, and not physical,
and they usually receive sexual approaches with indifference and
repugnance, because their sexual centres are anaesthetic or hyperaesthetic.
"During the period of sexual activity they seek much more the care and
delicate attention of men than the genital act, wh