ive side. The idea of being _strangled_ by a person I love
does. The great sensitiveness of one's throat and neck come in
here as well as the loss of breath. Once when I was about to be
separated from a man I cared for I put his hands on my throat and
implored him to kill me. It was a moment of madness, which helps
me to understand the feelings of a person always insane. Even now
that I am cool and collected I know that if I were deeply in love
with a man who I thought was going to kill me, especially in that
way, I would make no effort to save myself beforehand, though, of
course, in the final moments nature would assert herself without
my volition. What makes the horror of such cases in insanity is
the fact of the love being left out. But I think I find no
greater difficulty in picturing the mental attitude of a sadistic
lunatic than that of a normal man who gets pleasure out of women
for whom he has no love."

The imagined pleasure of being strangled by a lover brings us to a group
of feelings which would seem to be not unconnected with respiratory
elements. I refer to the pleasurable excitement experienced by some in
suspension, swinging, restraint, and fetters. Strangulation is the extreme
and most decided type of this group of imagined or real situations, in all
of which a respiratory disturbance seems to be an essential element.[126]

In explaining these phenomena we have to remark that respiratory
excitement has always been a conspicuous part of the whole process of
tumescence and detumescence, of the struggles of courtship and of its
climax, and that any restraint upon respiration, or, indeed, any restraint
upon muscular and emotional activity generally, tends to heighten the
state of sexual excitement associated with such activity.

I have elsewhere, when studying the spontaneous solitary
manifestation of the sexual instinct (_Auto-erotism_, in vol. i
of these _Studies_), referred to the pleasurably emotional, and
sometimes sexual, effects of swinging and similar kinds of
movement. It is possible that there is a certain significance in
the frequency with which the eighteenth-century French painters,
who lived at a time when the refinements of sexual emotion were
carefully sought out, have painted women in the act of swinging.
Fragonard mentions that in 1763 a gentleman invited him into the
country, with the reques