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

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXit certainly contains many individuals who are congenitalinverts with an acquired heterosexuality.When we consider well-marked cases of sexual inversionwe find certain characteristics which frequently tend torecur. While a considerable proportion (in my experienceover fifty per cent) belong to reasonably healthy families,in about forty per cent there is in the family some degreeof morbidity or abnormality eccentricity, alcoholism,neurasthenia or nervous diseaseof slight or greater degree.The heredity of inversion is well-marked, though ithas sometimes been denied; sometimes a brother andsister, a mother and son, an uncle and nephew, are bothinverted even unknown to each other; I find this familyor hereditary inversion in thirty-five per cent cases, andvon Romer has found exactly the same proportion. It isalone sufficient to show that inversion may be inborn.The general personal health is in about two-thirds of thecases good and sometimes very good; among the remainderthere is often a tendency to nervous trouble or to a moreor less unbalanced temperament; only a small proportion(about eight per cent in my experience) are markedlymorbid.In the great majority the inverted tendency appears inearly life, often at puberty, but frequently there are indicationsof it before puberty. Sexual precocity appears to bemarked in a large proportion and there is often a tendencyto sexual hyperaesthesia. Many inverts describe themselvesas "sensitive" or "nervous/* The influence of suggestioncan be not infrequently traced, but in these cases there isusually also evidence of predisposition. Masturbation hasbeen practiced in a large proportion of cases, but masturbationis also common among the heterosexual and thereis no reason to suppose that it is a factor in the causationof inversion. The erotic dreams of inverts are usually in-