y happy, for they experience the full intensity of his
passion and the boundlessness of his longing. The erotic craving of a
man simply means that women are to him the most important thing in life.
Women instinctively yield to that man who most eagerly desires them. The
coarse sensualist, to whom all women are alike, attracts sensual women,
not exactly because they find in him the satisfaction of their craving,
but because they themselves act on him indiscriminately. But a woman
will adapt herself with the greatest ease to the needs of the
differentiated erotic (for instance, she will become really sentimental
to please the man who prefers sentimental women), for she loves to give
herself to the man who most desires her and as he desires her.

Don Juan, animated by illimitable erotic yearning, is therefore the
undisputed master of the other sex. He has the power of bestowing
absolute happiness, even if only for a brief hour, because in his
boundless love (which is projected on anything but her) a woman receives
the supreme value. Maybe he would be saved if a woman denied herself to
him--maybe he would cease to be a seeker of love and become a
worshipper, for he could not refuse to believe in the woman who
rejected him; but it is his fate that no woman he woos can resist him,
that all throw themselves into his arms without an exception and without
a struggle.

Thus the seeker of love, too, though in a restricted sense, may be
regarded as a metaphysical erotic, for he loathes sexuality--his
portion--and yearns for a higher form of love. He shares this attitude
with the slave of love, who is also a sensualist and a would-be lover.
The slave of love imitates the attitude of the worshipper, but he
infallibly sinks into the sexual sphere. What the psychopathist since
Kraft-Ebbing designates as masochism, is the pathological degeneration
of this particular emotion, which is very common and appears in various
forms, but does not seem to me to be at all morbid. Certainly it is
morbid when a man allows himself to be insulted, bound and flogged, but
it is fairly normal when his passionate admiration is roused by an
imperious woman, who passes him by like a queen without even noticing
his abject adoration; when he longs to kneel down before her and kiss
her feet, which in reward would spurn him. Quite normal, too, is the
boyish happiness in serving an admired and adored woman (Kraft-Ebbing
calls this pageism) described so beautifu