ecome enamored of some prostitute or adventuress
who makes him marry her and thus takes possession of his fortune. The
law generally makes the matter valid, under the pretext that
individual liberty must be respected. Such sanction consists in
reality in sacrificing a patient for the profit of a female swindler.

SEXUAL ANAESTHESIA OR CONGENITAL ABSENCE OF THE SEXUAL SENSE AND
APPETITE

Sexual sensations are so intimately connected with the sexual appetite
that it is difficult to separate them. No doubt in the adult a certain
degree of sexual appetite may exist without any voluptuous sensation,
but this is a secondary phenomenon.

Complete sexual anaesthesia is very rare in man; it is not a special
form of anomaly, but the reduction to zero of a normal sensation and
the appetite which corresponds to it. The characteristic feature of
these cases is that, contrary to what occurs in eunuchs and
cryptorchids, not only the testicles, but all the correlative sexual
attributes (the beard, voice, character, etc.) are normally developed,
and are in no way inverted as in homosexual individuals. Sexual
anaesthesia causes no more suffering than color-blindness, but like the
latter it occasions individual troubles resulting from misunderstanding.
The sexual anaesthetic, having a more or less false idea of marriage,
often marries in complete ignorance, and the results are then
disastrous, thanks to our laws and customs.

In women, sexual anaesthesia is very common. Krafft-Ebing is wrong in
maintaining that in all such cases the women are always neurotic. A
number of absolutely normal and intelligent women remain all their
life completely cold from the sexual point of view, apart from the
normally passive character of the female sex in coitus. It is rather
the very libidinous woman who is pathological.

We have seen that the normal sexual sentiment of woman is developed
rather in the direction of love, and desire for children. Erotic men
often complain of the sexual coldness of their wives, which is
disagreeable to them; for pleasure in one sex excites and completes
that of the other. Cold women submit to coitus as a duty, or at any
rate only mentally enjoy their husband's caresses.

Sexual anaesthesia occurs normally in old age. It may occur at an
earlier age, owing to destruction or atrophy of the sexual glands,
great excesses, or on the contrary, extreme continence. Certain
diseases and psychoses may also cause it.

The