ss sadic impulses which may involuntarily occur in the
performance of normal coitus, are quite exempt from the second of
these causes.

Krafft-Ebing maintains that sadism is usually, if not always,
congenital and hereditary. Sadism is for a long time restrained by
fear, education or moral sentiments. It is only gradually, when normal
coitus cannot procure for the perverted sexual appetite the
satisfaction it requires, that the sadist gives way to his passion;
this gives the latter a false appearance of acquired vice.

The highest degree of sadism leads to assassination. In this way human
tigers entice young girls into a wood and cut them to pieces. Some
begin by forcing them to coitus, after frightening them, or half
strangling them; others masturbate in their ripped up entrails. But
some others have no desire for coitus, nor anything resembling it,
their desire being satisfied only by the sight of the terror,
suffering and blood of their victim, whom they torture before killing.
Others again associate desire with the rage of a wild beast to such a
point that they swallow parts of their victim's body and drink the
blood.

Sadists become experts in the art of assassination without discovery.
The cynicism with which some of them have described their sensations
shows their cold indifference toward the tragic and the horrible.
Krafft-Ebing describes a series of atrocious types of this kind, and
unfortunately the press and the criminal law courts continually give
us fresh examples. Some sadists assassinate children, others men, when
their perversion is complicated with pederasty or sexual inversion.
(The story of Bluebeard is probably based on the successive crimes of
a sadic.)

Sadists do not always confine their attacks to living people; some of
them are _necrophiles_, who violate dead bodies and cut them in
pieces: others again kill animals, whose sufferings and blood serve to
satisfy their desires.

Some sadists satisfy themselves by flogging prostitutes or pricking
them till they bleed, while others prefer to martyrize their victims
slowly, and thus procure the maximum of pleasure. Others again are
contented with scenes symbolical of servitude, in which women are
compelled to adore and supplicate them, etc. The humiliation of women
takes part in the sadist appetite of man and often degenerates into
fetichism. Simple imagination in which he plays the part of a tyrant,
and which are complicated with onanism or norm