nflamed with divine love. "What physiological
difference," he asks, "is there between this voluptuous sensation and that
enjoyed by the disciple of the Brotherhood of New Life? St. Theresa says
'bowels,' the woman doctor says 'womb,' that is all."[250]

The extreme form of auto-erotism is the tendency for the sexual
emotion to be absorbed and often entirely lost in
self-admiration. This Narcissus-like tendency, of which the
normal germ in women is symbolized by the mirror, is found in a
minor degree in some men, and is sometimes well marked in women,
usually in association with an attraction for other persons, to
which attraction it is, of course, normally subservient. "The
mirror," remarks Bloch (_Beitraege_ 1, p. 201), "plays an
important part in the genesis of sexual aberration.... It cannot
be doubted that many a boy and girl have first experienced sexual
excitement at the sight of their own bodies in a mirror."

Valera, the Spanish novelist, very well described this impulse in
his _Genio y Figura_. Rafaela, the heroine of this novel, says
that, after her bath: "I fall into a puerility which may be
innocent or vicious, I cannot decide. I only know that it is a
purely contemplative act, a disinterested admiration of beauty.
It is not coarse sensuality, but aesthetic platonism. I imitate
Narcissus; and I apply my lips to the cold surface of the mirror
and kiss my image. It is the love of beauty, the expression of
tenderness and affection for what God has made manifest, in an
ingenuous kiss imprinted on the empty and incorporeal
reflection." In the same spirit the real heroine of the _Tagebuch
einer Verlorenen_ (p. 114), at the point when she was about to
become a prostitute, wrote: "I am pretty. It gives me pleasure to
throw off my clothes, one by one, before the mirror, and to look
at myself, just as I am, white as snow and straight as a fir,
with my long, fine, hair, like a cloak of black silk. When I
spread abroad the black stream of it, with both hands, I am like
a white swan with black wings."

A typical case known to me is that of a lady of 28, brought up on
a farm. She is a handsome woman, of very large and fine
proportions, active and healthy and intelligent, with, however,
no marked sexual attraction to the opposite sex; at the same time
she is not inverted, though she wou