lly in Dostoievsky's novel, _A
Young Hero_, and fairly common among troubadours and minnesingers. (I
need only mention Ulrich von Lichtenstein.) There are numerous degrees
of this feeling--we frequently come across it in the novels of
Dostoievsky, Jacobsen, Strindberg, D'Annunzio, and others--but the
essence of it is always contained in the fact that the man, although
yearning to worship the beloved woman, cannot maintain himself in the
sphere of spiritual love, and aspires to direct physical contact. His
attitude, which closely imitates purely spiritual love, cannot be other
than sexual. The blending of love and sexuality together with the
incapacity of effecting a real synthesis, the confusion of value and
pleasure is most clearly shown in the masochist--far more clearly than
in the case of the (rare) seeker of love. The outward modes preferred by
the individual are a matter of indifference; for the most part they are
symbolical acts, indicating the lover's inferiority and the loftiness
and power of his mistress. What is really of importance is the spiritual
attitude which induces him to commit these strange acts, and in these we
find the characteristic attitude of the woman-worshipper: that of the
slave before his queen. The slave of love is a sensualist incapable of
approaching woman in a normally manly, instinctive and natural way, but
requiring the pose of the spiritual worshipper. One might be tempted to
believe that he harboured the secret wish to atone for his incapacity of
feeling a pure love by being degraded and ill-treated. Thus from a human
point of view the slave of love is a higher type than the seeker of
love; all his transgressions, the fault of his morbid disposition, come
home to him; he takes the blame of his sin upon his own shoulders, while
the seeker of love revenges himself on his victims for his own
shortcomings. The seeker of love is by nature polygamous, while the
slave of love is, as a rule, monogamous (and consequently has little
success with the opposite sex). Both aspire to a union of sensual and
spiritual eroticism, but in both cases the union is a failure. All the
repulsive and terrible manifestations of these perversions which have
been recorded, can easily be shown to fit my theory. In psychological
research it is merely a question of selecting the great types from the
mass of phenomena and determining them correctly.

The so-called _fetichist_, too, whose passion is roused by indiffer