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

THE SEXUAL IMPULSE IN YOUTHthose conceptions of incubi and succubi which played soimportant a part in the demonology of the Middle Ages.Such erotic dreams of the hysterical are by no meansalways, or even usually, of a pleasurable character. Insome cases the illusion of sexual intercourse even provokesacute pain. This was affirmed by the witches of oldand is also found today. Sometimes this is largely theresult of a conflict in consciousness with a merely physicalimpulse which isstrong enough to assert itself in spite ofthe emotional and intellectual abhorrence of the subject.It isthus but an extreme form of the disgust which allsexual physical manifestations tend to inspire in a personwho is not inclined to respond to them. Somewhat similarpsychic disgust and physical pain are produced in theattempts to stimulate the sexual emotions and organswhen these are exhausted by exercise. It is quite probable,however, that there is a physiological, as well as a psychic,factor in this phenomenon, and Sollier, in his elaboratestudy of the nature and genesis of hysteria, by insisting onthe capital importance of the disturbance of sensibility inhysteria, and the definite character of the phenomenabetween anesthesia and normalproduced in the passagesensation, helped to reveal the mechanism of this featureof auto-erotic excitement in the hysterical.No doubt there has been a tendency to exaggerate theunpleasant character of the auto-erotic phenomena ofhysteria. That tendency was an inevitable reaction againstan earlier view, according to which hysteria was littlemore than an unconscious expression of the sexual emotionsand as such was unscientifically dismissed withoutany careful investigation. We may agree with Freud thatthe sexual needs of the hysterical are just as individualand various as those of normal women, but that theysuffer from them more, largely through a moral struggle