an inevitable
reaction against an earlier view, according to which hysteria was little
more than an unconscious expression of the sexual emotions and as such was
unscientifically dismissed without any careful investigation. I agree with
Breuer and Freud that the sexual needs of the hysterical are just as
individual and various as those of normal women, but that they suffer from
them more, largely through a moral struggle with their own instincts, and
the attempt to put them into the background of consciousness.[248] In many
hysterical and psychically abnormal women, auto-erotic phenomena, and
sexual phenomena generally, are highly pleasurable, though such persons
may be quite innocent of any knowledge of the erotic character of the
experience. I have come across interesting and extreme examples of this in
the published experiences of the women followers of the American religious
leader, T.L. Harris, founder of the "Brotherhood of the New Life." Thus,
in a pamphlet entitled "Internal Respiration," by Respiro, a letter is
quoted from a lady physician, who writes: "One morning I awoke with a
strange new feeling in the womb, which lasted for a day or two; I was so
very happy, but the joy was in my womb, not in my heart."[249] "At last,"
writes a lady quoted in the same pamphlet, "I fell into a slumber, lying
on my back with arms and feet folded, a position I almost always find
myself in when I awake, no matter in which position I may go to sleep.
Very soon I awoke from this slumber with a most delightful sensation,
every fibre tingling with an exquisite glow of warmth. I was lying on my
left side (something I am never able to do), and was folded in the arms of
my counterpart. Unless you have seen it, I cannot give you an idea of the
beauty of his flesh, and with what joy I beheld and felt it. Think of it,
luminous flesh; and Oh! such tints, you never could imagine without
seeing. He folded me so closely in his arms," etc. In such cases there is
no conflict between the physical and the psychic, and therefore the
resulting excitement is pleasurable and not painful.

At this point our study of auto-erotism brings us into the sphere of
mysticism. Leuba, in a penetrating and suggestive essay on Christian
mysticism, after quoting the present _Study_, refers to the famous
passages in which St. Theresa describes how a beautiful little angel
inserted a flame-tipped dart into her heart until it descended into her
bowels and left her i