and, henceforth, instead of
sleeping in her room, he was placed in another room and treated
by her as a big boy. "Who would have believed," he adds, "that
this childish punishment, received at the age of 8 from the hand
of a young woman of 30, would have determined my tastes, my
desires, my passions, for the rest of my life?" He remarks that
this strange taste drove him almost to madness, but maintained
the purity of his morals, and the joys of love existed for him
chiefly in imagination. (J.J. Rousseau, _Les Confessions_, partie
i, livre i.) It will be seen how all the favoring conditions of
fear, shame, and precocious sexuality were here present in an
extremely sensitive child destined to become the greatest
emotional force of his century, and receptive to influences which
would have had no permanent effect on any ordinary child. (When,
as occasionally happens, the first sexual feelings are
experienced under the stimulation of whipping in normal children,
no permanent perversion necessarily follows; Moll mentions that
he knows such cases, _Zeitschrift fuer Paedagogie, Psychiatrie, und
Pathologie_, 1901.) It may be added that it is, perhaps, not
fanciful to see a certain inevitableness in the fact that on
Rousseau's highly sensitive and receptive temperament it was a
masochistic germ that fell and fructified, while on Regis's
subject, with his more impulsive ancestral antecedents, a
sadistic germ found favorable soil.

It may be noted that in Regis's sadistic case the little girl who
was the boy's playmate found scarcely less pleasure in the
passive part of whipping than he found in the active. There is
ample evidence to show that this is very often the case, and that
the attractiveness of the idea of being whipped often even arises
spontaneously in children. Lombroso (_La Donna Delinquente_, p.
404) refers to a girl of 7 who had voluptuous pleasure in being
whipped, and Hammer (_Monatschrift fuer Harnkrankheiten_, 1906, p.
398) speaks of a young girl who similarly experienced pleasure in
punishment by whipping. Krafft-Ebing records the case of a girl
of between 6 and 8 years of age, never at that time having been
whipped or seen anyone else whipped, who spontaneously
acquired--how she did not know--the desire to be castigated in
this manner. It gave her very great pleasur