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

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXand probably the most effective. Such resort isperhapsespecially beneficial in nervous and over-excitable personswhose sexual erethism is not the outcome of sexual vigor.In robust and temperamentally sexual personsthe bromidesare often useless unless pushed to an extent productiveo a general deadening of the finer activities.This isnot a satisfactory method of dealing with a greatnatural impulse capable of fine uses. We have to recognizethe limitations of our powers in this field, refrainfrom platitudes in the face of difficulties which the socialenvironment often renders inevitable, and leave to thethose diffi-patient himself the responsibility of solvingculties.There are indeed some physicians who boldly declarethat in this matter we must ourselves assume an unlimitedresponsibility. A patient comes say, a Catholic priest ora married woman with an impotent husband clearlysuffering from nervous troubles as a result of sexual abstinence.It is our duty, they say, to these patients, firmlyto recommend sexual intercourse. I do not think so.Apartfrom the fact that the physician obviously cannot guaranteethe purity of the drug he isprescribing, apart alsofrom the immorality of recommending in private a courseof action entirely opposed to that which, in all probability,he implicitly or explicitly recommends in public, thephysician who gives advice outside his own strictly medicalsphereis bound to consider the wider effects of thatadvice on the patient himself. Ifas in the instances mentionedsuch advice leads a man into conduct antagonisticto his professional character, or leads a woman to placeherself in a painful social position, the results, even tohealth, may be worse than those involved by the struggleto repress sexual desire; one struggle has merely givenplace to another and perhaps more serious struggle. The[264]