cure involved a
venereal disorder. The patient was enabled to marry and to beget
children.[248] It is a method of treatment which seems to have found few
imitators. This we need not regret. The histories I have recorded in
previous chapters show that it is not uncommon for even a pronounced
invert to be able sometimes to effect coitus. It often becomes easy if at
the time he fixes his thoughts on images connected with his own sex. But
the perversion remains unaffected; the subject is merely (as one of Moll's
inverts expressed it) practising masturbation _per vaginam_. Such
treatment is a training in vice, and, as Raffalovich points out, the
invert is simply perverted and brought down to the vicious level which
necessarily accompanies perversity.[249]

There can be no doubt that in slight and superficial cases of
homosexuality, suggestion may really exert an influence. We can scarcely
expect it to exert such influence when the homosexual tendency is deeply
rooted in an organic inborn temperament. In such cases indeed the subject
may resist suggestion even when in the hypnotic state. This is pointed out
by Moll, a great authority on hypnotism, and with much experience of its
application to homosexuality, but never inclined to encourage an
exaggerated notion of its efficacy in this field. Forel, who was also an
authority on hypnotism, was equally doubtful as to its value in relation
to inversion, especially in clearly inborn cases. Krafft-Ebing at the end
said little about it, and Naecke (who was himself without faith in this
method of treating inversion) stated that he had been informed by the
last homosexual case treated by Krafft-Ebing by hypnotism that, in spite
of all good-will on the patient's side, the treatment had been quite
useless. Fere, also, had no belief in the efficacy of suggestive
treatment, nor has Merzbach, nor Rohleder. Numa Praetorius states that the
homosexual subjects he is acquainted with, who had been so treated, were
not cured, and Hirschfeld remarks that the inverts "cured" by hypnotism
were either not cured or not inverted.[250]

Moll has shown his doubt as to the wide applicability of suggestive
therapeutics in homosexuality by developing in recent years what he terms
association-therapy. In nearly all perverse individuals, he points out,
there is a bridge,--more or less weak, no doubt,--which leads to the
normal sexual life. By developing such links of association with
normality, Moll believe