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

THE SEXUAL IMPULSE IN YOUTHit as at once both neurotic and healthy. It seems mostreasonable to regard it as entirely natural. Animals dream,and we may sometimes note that a sleeping dog imitatesthe movements of running; savage races dream, and whilethere are a great number of people who are not consciousof dreaming, they often find traces of dreams when theybegin to give attention to the matter; we may well believethat their mental activity during sleep is usually at so lowan ebb that it leaves no memory on awakening.There has been the same difference of opinion regardingerotic dreams, accompanied or not by orgasm, asregarding dreams generally. That under conditions ofsexual abstinence in healthy individuals there tend to besome auto-erotic manifestations during waking-life, boththeory and a careful study of the facts lead us to believe.There can be no doubt, however, that, under the sameconditions, the occurrence of the complete orgasm duringsleep with, in men, seminal emissions, is altogether normal.In many parts of the world, indeed, such manifestationsare attributed to the excitation of demons. TheCatholic Church has attributed serious importance to theimpurity of what it termed pollutio, while Luther alsoseems to have regarded erotic dreams as a kind of diseasedemanding at once the medicine of marriage. Even somedistinguished medical authorities (notably Moll andEulenburg) have put nocturnal seminal emissions on thesame level as the nocturnal emission of urine or as vomiting,and it cannot be denied that under primitively naturalconditions there is justification for this view.Since, however, some degree of sexual abstinence ismore or less inevitable under our social conditions, mostauthorities are inclined to regard the nocturnal phenomenawhich result from that abstinence as fairly normal;they are only concerned as to itsfrequency.Cs]