ocial alcoholic misery by force of example, instead of
empty phrases. He will then discover, like all abstainers, that the
usage of alcohol (including wine, cider and beer) however small the
quantity consumed, only serves to maintain a habit which is vicious
and disastrous to society, by giving the contagious example of
so-called moderation, to which a great number of persons cannot
restrict themselves. He will then abstain for the rest of his days,
and it will become more and more incomprehensible to him how humanity
has been led, first by the spirit of imitation, later by the
conservation of prejudices, to develop, maintain and defend such a
social abuse by the aid of a legion of sophisms.

SEXUAL ANOMALIES AND PERVERSIONS BY SUGGESTION AND AUTO-SUGGESTION

The role of the phenomena of suggestion in sexual life is much greater
than is generally supposed. I shall return to this subject in a
special chapter, but I may state here that there is a category of
sexual perversions and anomalies of all kinds which are not hereditary
but acquired, and which Krafft-Ebing, although he cites striking
examples, wrongly attributes to the effect of sexual excess and
depravity, or which he compares to ordinary psychopathia, while in
reality they are only the direct effect of strong suggestion or
auto-suggestion.

I place in this category the cases where a man, whose sexuality has
hitherto been normal, suddenly becomes pathological as the result of
some circumstance which produces on him a profound impression. For
instance, the sexual appetite of an individual may be strongly
excited, in a brothel or elsewhere, by an erotic woman whose feet or
shoes are especially elegant. The sight of this well-fitted foot
exalts his sexual desire to a high degree. From this moment feminine
shoes, by subjective association, exercise on him an irresistible
erotic power, which dominates everything else and transforms him into
a fetichist; the female body no longer elicits his appetite, the
latter having become the slave of the image of shoes only. (Shoe
fetichism.)

Sexual inversion may also be acquired by suggestion, when a normal man
becomes excited by acts of masturbation or pederasty, or simply by
some psychic image with a strongly suggestive action. He may thus lose
his normal sexual appetite for women and become homosexual.

These phenomena occur especially in individuals whose suggestibility
is pathological or hysterical, or even simply e