Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

THE SEXUAL IMPULSE IN YOUTHuntil the end of the last century serious physicians frequentlytook for granted that some grave result or othermight be induced by masturbation.It was during the second half of the nineteenth century,when a new biological conception, under the inspirationof Darwin was slowly permeating medicine, that the ideaof infantile and youthful "perversion" began to be undermined;on the one hand the new scientific study of sex,started by the pioneering work of Krafft-Ebing at the endof the third quarter of die century, showed how commonare such so-called "perversions" in early life while, on theother hand, the conception of evolution began to make itclear that we must not apply developed adult standards toundeveloped creatures, what is natural at one stage notnecessarily being natural at the previous stage.An early representative of these influences was theItalian psychiatrist Silvio Venturi, who belonged to thePositivist school which sought in Italy to fertilize medicinewith the new biological and social conceptions; he publishedin 1892 his elaborate study, Le Degenerazioni Psicosessuali,asexhibited in the individual and in social history,a work wherein various large and fruitful conceptionswere thrown out. Venturi regarded sexual developmentas a slow process, not properly to be termed "sexual"until puberty, yet made up of separate factors which beganat the beginning of life their separate development(infantile erections being such a factor and the later eroticsensibility of the lips being similarly developed in earlylife by non-erotic exercise) before they combine, afterpuberty, to constitute what may properly be termed sexuality,or, as Venturi, insisting on the psychic elementtermed it, amore. Masturbation (onanism, as Venturialways terms it)isregarded as "the germ of what laterwill be love." It appears in early youth, havingits rudi-