al, although they are as a rule only observed and described in
their pathological form.

The fundamental form of so-called sadism may be discovered in an erotic
type which I will call the seeker of love. A lover of this type is
characterised by an unappeasable longing for pure, spiritual love; he
passes from woman to woman in the hope of realising this desire, but
owing to his own material disposition he is unable to do so. Time after
time he succumbs to sexual promptings. Thus groping, frequently quite
unconsciously--for a fictitious being, he hates every woman whose fate
it is to rouse his desire, for each one cheats him out of that which he
seeks. A genuine illusionist, he knows nothing of the woman of flesh and
blood, and continues seeking his ideal, only to be again and again
disappointed. He blames every woman he conquers for what is really his
own insufficiency; he despises her or revenges himself on her, punishes
and ill-treats her; we recognise the true Don Juan and his morbid
caricature, the sadist. But even the most brutal representative of this
type may still be psychologically described as "a man who seeks
spiritual love in woman after woman and, finding only sexuality,
revenges himself on her." Quite a number of men harbour sadistic
feelings for only one woman, and that the one to whom they owe their
great disillusionment. Doubtless many men have almost lost the psychical
roots of their perversions and are completely involved in physical acts.
There is nothing remarkable in this fact; it occurs in every sphere of
human life. The vague instinct of revenge on woman animates also, though
perhaps unconsciously, the pathological sadist.

There is one thing which the seeker of love and the woman-worshipper
have in common: both seek a higher ideal far beyond the woman of
every-day life; but while the worshipper safeguards the purity of his
feeling by putting the greatest possible distance between him and the
object of his worship (and is therefore never disappointed), the seeker
of love, blinded by the illusion that he has at last found the object of
his quest, draws every woman towards him and again and again discovers
that he is nothing but a sensualist. Every fresh conquest destroys his
dream afresh, and he revenges himself, if he is a Don Juan, by despising
and disgracing the unfortunate victim, and if he is a sadist, by
maltreating her. And yet he never entirely loses his illusion; he craves
for complete sa