Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Vol. 1-6). Havelock Ellis
on his part that it was as well that our affection should cease even at the cost of misunderstanding. Since then, three years ago, I have not had a happy day or night, and am therefore quite unable to promote happiness in others. Without my friend, I can find no satisfaction with wife, child, or home. Life has become almost unbearable. Often I have seriously thought of committing suicide, only to postpone it to a time which would be less cruelly inopportune to others. I see my friend (now married) almost daily, and suffer tortures at seeing others nearer to him than myself. No explanation seems possible, as the whole idea of inversion is so repugnant to him, and being an honorable man he would feel marital ties preclude any warmth of affection. But all the longing of my life seems to be culminating in a driving force which will carry me to the male prostitute or to death. I can concentrate my mind on nothing else, and consequently have become inefficient in work and have no heart for play. I know if my longings could be occasionally satisfied I should immediately recover, but my fear is that if I killed myself those who knew me in happier days would only be confirmed in the impression of my degeneracy and would feel my instincts had caused it, whereas it is the denial and starvation of them which would have brought about the result. I know now by experience of self and others that my disposition is congenital and that I have been rendered unhappy myself and a cause of unhappiness to others by the too late knowledge of myself. The example of my former friend who married misled me to think I too could marry and make a happy home; so that when the man I loved advised me I resolved to do so, as I would have done almost anything else he suggested. If I could have withdrawn from the engagement without embarrassment to the devoted woman who became my wife I would have done so, if she gave me the opportunity. Nothing in my married state has brought me pleasure and I often wish my wife would cease to love me so that we might separate. But she would be heart-broken at the suggestion and I feel driven to attempt to relieve my feelings even in a way that has previously seemed repulsive to me—I mean by use of money.
"About my feelings toward my child there is not much to say, as they are not very strong. I believe I carry him and help bathe and attend to him as much as most fathers, and when he is a few years older I hope I may find him very companionable. But he has brought me no real joy, though I see other men look at him almost with affection. But he has brought added happiness to his mother."
The next case is interesting as showing the mental and emotional development in a very radical case of sexual inversion.
HISTORY XX.—Englishman, of independent means, aged 49. His father and his father's family were robust, healthy, and prolific. On his mother's side, phthisis, insanity, and eccentricity are traceable. He belongs to a large family, some of whom died in early childhood and at birth, while others are normal. He himself was a weakly and highly nervous child, subject to night-terrors and somnambulism, excessive shyness and religious disquietude.
Sexual consciousness awoke before the age of 8, when his attention was directed to his own penis. His nurse, while out walking with him one day, told him that when little boys grow' up their penes fall off. The nursery-maid sniggered, and he felt that there must be something peculiar about the penis. He suffered from; irritability of the prepuce, and the nurse powdered it before he went to sleep. There was no transition from this to self-abuse.
About the same time he became subject to curious half-waking dreams. In these he imagined himself the servant of several adult naked sailors; he crouched between their thighs and called himself their dirty pig, and by their orders he performed services for their genitals and buttocks, which he contemplated and handled with relish. At about the same period, when these visions began to come to him, he casually heard that a man used to come and expose his person before the window of a room where the maids sat; this troubled him vaguely. Between the age of 8 and 11 he twice took the penis of a cousin into his mouth, after they had slept together; the feeling of the penis pleased him. When sleeping with another cousin, they used to lie with hands outstretched to cover each other's penis or nates. He preferred the nates, but his cousin the penis. Neither of these cousins was homosexual, and there was no attempt at mutual masturbation. He was in the habit of playing with five male cousins. One of these boys was unpopular with the others, and they invented a method of punishing him for supposed offenses. They sat around the room on chairs, each with his penis exposed, and the boy to be punished went around the room on his knees and took each penis into his mouth in turn. This was supposed to humiliate him. It did not lead to masturbation. On one occasion the child accidentally observed a boy who sat next to him in school playing with his penis and caressing it. This gave him a powerful, uneasy sensation. With regard to all these points the subject observes that none of the boys with whom he was connected at this period, and who were exposed to precisely the same influences, became homosexual.
He was himself, from the first, indifferent to the opposite sex. In early childhood, and up to the age of 13, he had frequent opportunities of closely inspecting the sexual organs of girls, his playfellows. These roused no sexual excitement. On the contrary, the smell of the female parts affected him disagreeably. When he once saw a schoolfellow copulating with a little girl, it gave him a sense of mystical horror. Nor did the sight of the male organs arouse any particular sensations. He is, however, of opinion that, living with his sisters in childhood, he felt more curious about his own sex as being more remote from him. He showed no effeminacy in his preferences for games or work.
He went to a public school. Here he was provoked by boy friends to masturbate, but, though he often saw the act in process, it only inspired him with a sense of indecency. In his fifteenth year puberty commenced with nocturnal emissions, and, at the same time, he began to masturbate, and continued to do so about once a week, or once a fortnight, during a period of eight months; always with a feeling that that was a poor satisfaction and repulsive. His thoughts were not directed either to males or females while masturbating. He spoke to his father about these signs of puberty, and by his father's advice he entirely abandoned onanism; he only resumed the practice, to some extent, after the age of 30, when he was without male comradeship.
The nocturnal emissions, after he had abandoned self-abuse, became very frequent and exhausting. They were medically treated by tonics such as quinine and strychnine. He thinks this treatment exaggerated his neurosis.
All this time, no kind of sexual feeling for girls made itself felt. He could not understand what his schoolfellows found in women, or the stories they told about wantonness and delight of coitus.
His old dreams about the sailors had disappeared. But now he enjoyed visions of beautiful young men and exquisite statues; he often shed tears when he thought of them. These dreams persisted for years. But another kind gradually usurped their place to some extent. These second visions took the form of the large, erect organs of naked young grooms or peasants. These gross visions offended his taste and hurt him, though, at the same time, they evoked a strong, active desire for possession; he took a strange, poetic pleasure in the ideal form. But the seminal losses which accompanied both kinds of dreams were a perpetual source of misery to him.
There is no doubt that at this time—that is, between the fifteenth and seventeenth years—a homosexual diathesis had become established. He never frequented loose women, though he sometimes thought that would be the best way of combating his growing inclination for males. And he thinks that he might have brought himself to indulge freely in purely sexual pleasure with women if he made their first acquaintance in a male costume, as débardeuses, Cherubino, court-pages, young halberdiers, as it is only when so clothed that women on the stage or in the ball-room have excited him.
His ideal of morality and fear of venereal infection, more than physical incapacity, kept him what is called chaste. He never dreamed of women, never sought their society, never felt the slightest sexual excitement in their presence, never idealized them. Esthetically, he thought them far less beautiful than men. Statues and pictures of naked women had no attraction for him, while all objects of art which represented handsome males deeply stirred him.
It was in his eighteenth year that an event occurred which he regards as decisive in his development. He read Plato. A new world opened, and he felt that his own nature had been revealed. Next year he formed a passionate, but pure, friendship with a boy of 15. Personal contact with the boy caused erection, extreme agitation, and aching pleasure, but not ejaculation. Through four years he never saw the boy naked or touched