ich they often only
tolerate. Many households, begun under the happiest auspices--the bride
all the more apt to believe that she loves her betrothed in virtue of her
suggestibility, easily exalted, perhaps at the expense of the
senses--become hells on earth. The sexual act has for the hysterical woman
more than one disillusion; she cannot understand it; it inspires her with
insurmountable repugnance."[246] I refer to these hysterical phenomena
because they present to us, in an extreme form, facts which are common
among women whom, under the artificial conditions of civilized life, we
are compelled to regard as ordinarily healthy and normal. The frequent
painfulness of auto-erotic phenomena is by no means an exclusively
hysterical phenomenon, although often seen in a heightened form in
hysterical conditions. It is probably to some extent simply the result of
a conflict in consciousness with a merely physical impulse which is strong
enough to assert itself in spite of the emotional and intellectual
abhorrence of the subject. It is thus but an extreme form of the disgust
which all sexual physical manifestations tend to inspire in a person who
is not inclined to respond to them. Somewhat similar psychic disgust and
physical pain are produced in the attempts to stimulate the sexual
emotions and organs when these are exhausted by exercise. In the detailed
history which Moll presents, of the sexual experiences of a sister in an
American nursing guild,--a most instructive history of a woman fairly
normal except for the results of repressed sexual emotion, and with strong
moral tendencies,--various episodes are narrated well illustrating the way
in which sexual excitement becomes unpleasant or even painful when it
takes place as a physical reflex which the emotions and intellect are all
the time struggling against.[247] It is quite probable, however, that
there is a physiological, as well as a psychic, factor in this phenomenon,
and Sollier, in his elaborate study of the nature and genesis of hysteria,
by insisting on the capital importance of the disturbance of sensibility
in hysteria, and the definite character of the phenomena produced in the
passage between anaesthesia and normal sensation, has greatly helped to
reveal the mechanism of this feature of auto-erotic excitement in the
hysterical.

No doubt there has been a tendency to exaggerate the unpleasant character
of the auto-erotic phenomena of hysteria. That tendency was