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

SEXUAL DEVIATIONThey need therefore a stronger than normal stimulus toarouse sexual activity. Strong sensations and strong emotions,even those of the most unlikely kind, such as anxietyand grief, are able to act as sexual stimuli, and so to producepleasure though in themselves painful. Cullerre hasbrought forward a number of cases, mostly in personsmanifesting symptoms of nervous exhaustion, both menand women, often highly moral people, in whom fits ofanxiety and dread, sometimes of a religious character, terminatedin spontaneous orgasm or masturbation. Thewidely extended implications of this fundamental psychologicalfact are taken advantage of, consciously or unconsciously,by the algolagnic subject to reinforce hisfeeble sexual impulse.It must further be remembered that in a mild degreepain (with the associated emotions of shock, anxiety, disgust,contempt, etc.) whether witnessed in others or ex-,perienced in themselves, can for many people, especiallyif neurotically disposed, evoke a pleasurable psychic statewithout being intense enough to stimulate actually sexualsensations. The natural reaction to pain is pathetic or sympathetic;one is sorry for it in oneself, one is, to a lessextent that varies with the affective nearness, sorry for itin others. But a certain element of pleasure or satisfactionis also possible. The classic expression of this is the passagein Lucretius (Book II) concerning the feelings of the manand it is in-safe on shore who witnesses others drowning,teresting to see how Lucretius explained it; "It is sweetto contemplate from the shore the peril of the unhappysailor struggling with death, not that we take pleasure inthe misfortunes of others, but that it is consoling to viewevils we are not experiencing." On newspaper placardsthere is no more frequent, and therefore presumably alluring,adjective than "amazing," and the "amazing" usually[201]