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

MARRIAGEof a "male menopause." On this ground Maran6n prefersthe term "critical age/' meaning thereby a stage of organicevolution, having permanently at its center the extinctionor diminution of active genital life, although this is notthe axis on which itturns. The biological foundation isgenital decadence with changed neuro-endocrine reactions.Kenneth Walker would place the age of this change atabout 55 to 60, Rankin between 57 and 63, Max Marcusebetween 45 and 55 and even at 40. In many cases, I wouldsay, such a period occurs even near the age of 38. Theman suddenly realizes that the period of expanding powerhas reached its limits, even that there is a comparativefailure of power, this also manifesting itself in the sexualsphere, and by a sudden revulsion of feeling he may beginto feel that he is no longer a young man but an old man.Such a recognition with advance of age may involve notonly the liability to an eruption of sexual activity butalso the development of a certain egotism and callousnesswhich facilitates its manifestations; this is on the wholebeneficial, because it protects enfeebled old age from therisks of strong emotion, but it is liable to abuses of whichthe most dangerous occur should there be an efflorescenceof activity in the sexual sphere. In abnormal cases theremay be exhibitionism, the sexual attraction to young girls,or, sometimes, taking a homosexual turn ("retardedhomosexuality") to , boys. The distinguished German novelistThomas Mann has dealt in Der Tod in Venedig withthis theme, which he has himself stated to be an illustrationof the pathological male climacteric. Hirschfeldbelieves that this phenomenon is speciallymarked in unmarriedmen and widows, and Max Marcuse in sexuallyinadequate men.The wider psychic aspects of this male climacteric arefrequently said to include that loss of youthful aggressive-