ppears to have been largely due to Griesinger, in the middle of the
last century, that we owe the first authoritative appearance of a saner,
more discriminating view regarding the results of masturbation. Although
still to some extent fettered by the traditions prevalent in his day,
Griesinger saw that it was not so much masturbation itself as the feelings
aroused in sensitive minds by the social attitude toward masturbation
which produced evil effects. "That constant struggle," he wrote, "against
a desire which is even overpowering, and to which the individual always in
the end succumbs, that hidden strife between shame, repentance, good
intentions, and the irritation which impels to the act, this, after not a
little acquaintance with onanists, we consider to be far more important
than the primary direct physical effect." He added that there are no
specific signs of masturbation, and concluded that it is oftener a symptom
than a cause. The general progress of educated opinions since that date
has, in the main, confirmed and carried forward the results cautiously
stated by Griesinger. This distinguished alienist thought that, when
practiced in childhood, masturbation might lead to insanity. Berkhan, in
his investigation of the psychoses of childhood, found that in no single
case was masturbation a cause. Vogel, Uffelmann, and Emminghaus, in the
course of similar studies, have all come to almost similar
conclusions.[323] It is only on a congenitally morbid nervous system,
Emminghaus insists, that masturbation can produce any serious results.
"Most of the cases charged to masturbation," writes Kiernan (in a private
letter), basing his opinion on wide clinical experience, "are either
hebephrenia or hysteria in which an effect is taken for the cause."
Christian, during twenty years' experience in hospitals, asylums, and
private practice in town and country, has not found any seriously evil
effects from masturbation.[324] He thinks, indeed, that it may be a more
serious evil in women than in men. But Yellowlees considers that in women
"it is possibly less exhausting and injurious than in the other sex,"
which was also the opinion of Hammond, as well as of Guttceit, though he
found that women pushed the practice much further than men, and Naecke, who
has given special attention to this point, could not find that
masturbation is a definite cause of insanity in women in a single
case.[325] Koch also reaches a similar conclusion, a