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absolutely frigid. Cold as ice toward other men, she may have
insatiable sexual desire for the man she loves.
The question is often raised whether a woman can love more than once
in her life. There is no doubt that many women are so monogamous by
instinct that they cannot love more than once; but it is also certain
that a hysterical woman is capable of loving several times, and very
different persons at different periods of her life. The personality of
certain erotic hysterical women is even so dissociable that they can
love with all their strength several men at the same time. But the
hysterical woman is also capable of hating a man with as much ardor as
she formerly loved him; or, on the contrary, of loving the one she
formerly hated, according to the suggestion of the moment. The same
phenomena occur in hysterical men.
For the same reasons the quality of the sexual sensations and
sentiments may vary in a hysterical subject according to the
influences it is subjected to, and pass from the normal to the
perverted state, or inversely. I have observed a case where a highly
cultured hysterical subject, in her early youth, fell in love with
another young girl. At this period her sentiments were purely
homosexual; her love for the young girl was clearly inverted and
accompanied by intense sexual desire, while she was absolutely
indifferent to men. Later on, a man fell in love with her, and she
yielded to him rather from pity and feminine passiveness than from
love. Still later she fell passionately in love with another man,
quite as much as she had been with the young girl of her early youth.
Her latest love was both exalted and libidinous. Her sexual appetite
had thus taken the normal direction under the influence of a
hetero-sexual affection.
In hysterical men analogous changes occur less easily, on account of
the nature of masculine sexuality which distinguishes more clearly
between the mind and the appetite; but these changes are observed
sometimes. In woman, the hysterical imagination and dissociation
facilitate a polyandrous irradiation of the sexual appetite, which is
otherwise rare in the female sex. In this respect the sexuality of
hysterical women resembles that of men and differs from that of
normal women. Hysterical men, on the other hand, become more feminine,
not by their appetite being less polygamous, but by the more
dissociated form of their thoughts and sentiments.
(9). A variety of the patholo
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