oducing a divorce in
later life between the physical sensuous impulses and the ideal emotions.
The sensuous impulse having been evolved and perverted before the
manifestation of the higher emotion, the two groups of feelings have
become divorced for the whole of life. This is a common source of much
personal misery and family unhappiness, though at the same time the clash
of contending impulses may lead to a high development of moral character.
When early masturbation is a factor in producing sexual inversion it
usually operates in the manner I have here indicated, the repulsion for
normal coitus helping to furnish a soil on which the inverted impulse may
develop unimpeded.

This point has not wholly escaped previous observers, though they
do not seem to have noted its psychological mechanism. Tissot
stated that masturbation causes an aversion to marriage. More
recently, Loiman ("Ueber Onanismus beim Weibe," _Therapeutische
Monatshefte_, April, 1890) considered that masturbation in women,
leading to a perversion of sexual feeling, including inability to
find satisfaction in coitus, affects the associated centres.
Smith Baker, again ("The Neuropsychical Element in Conjugal
Aversion," _Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease_, September,
1892), finds that a "source of marital aversion seems to lie in
the fact that substitution of mechanical and iniquitous
excitations affords more thorough satisfaction than the mutual
legitimate ones do," and gives cases in point. Savill, also, who
believes that masturbation is more common in women than is
usually supposed, regards dyspareunia, or pain in coition, as one
of the signs of the habit.

Masturbation in women thus becomes, as Raymond and Janet point
out (_Les Obsessions_, vol. ii, p. 307) a frequent cause of
sexual frigidity in marriage. These authors illustrate the train
of evils which may thus be set up, by the case of a lady, 26
years of age, a normal woman, of healthy family, who, at the age
of 15, was taught by a servant to masturbate. At the age of 18
she married. She loved her husband, but she had no sexual
feelings in coitus, and she continued to masturbate, sometimes
several times a day, without evil consequences. At 24 she had to
go into a hospital for floating kidney, and was so obliged to
stop masturbating. She here accidentally learnt of the evil
results