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

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXperhapsbe better to use the term Zooerastia, proposed byKrafft-Ebing.Among children, both boys and girls,it is common tofind that the copulationof animals is a mysteriously fascinatingspectacle.It is inevitable that this should be so,for the spectacleis more or less clearly felt to be therevelation of a secret which has been concealed fromthem. It is, moreover, a secret of which they feel intimatereverberations within themselves, and even in perfectlyinnocent and ignorant children the sight may produce anobscure sexual excitement. It would seem that this occursmore frequently in girlsthan in boys. Even in adultage, it may be added, women are liable to experience thesame kind of emotion in the presence of such spectacles.In the sixteenth century, both in England and France,the ladies of royal and aristocratic circles would almostopenly go to enjoy such spectacles. In more modern timessuch sights are regarded as both prurient and morbid, andfor ill-balanced minds no doubt are so.While the contemplation of animal coitus is an easilyintelligible and in early life, perhaps, an almost normalsymbol of sexual emotion, there is another sub-divisionof this group of animal fetichisms which forms a naturaltransition from the fetichisms which have their center inthe human body: the stuff-fetichism or the sexual attractionexerted by various tissues, perhaps always of animalorigin. Here we are in the presence of a somewhat complicatedphenomenon. In part we have, in a considerablenumber of cases, the sexual attraction of feminine garments,for all such tissues are liable to enter into thedress. In part, also, we have a sexual deviation of tactilesensibility, for in a considerable proportion of these casesit is the touch sensations which are potent in arousingthe erotic impulse. But in part, also, it would seem, we