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

THE ART OF LOVEthose poetic treatises on the Art of Love which remainedfamous, and sometimes infamous, for more than fifteencenturies, and so it still was in Christendom. It was notproper or respectable or moral to treat sexual love, eithersocially or in literature, as anything but a duty. It is sometimessaid that, for modern times, the first beginnings ofthe art of love were discovered in France in the twelfthcentury, but it remained a rather illegitimate art.Today the situation is different. To regard love as anart iscommonly justified, and moralists themselves arenot behindhand in maintaining that justification. Theyrecognize that duty alone is no longer an adequate motivefor fidelity in marriage, and that to enlarge the basis oflove, to multiply the motives that make mutual affectionattractive, by converting love into an art, is to deepenthe foundations of a marital union and to fortify its morality.We are not here directly concerned with morality,but we are entitled to allow for its claims.Attempts to recognize this art date some time back inmodern civilization. Ambroise Par, a great pioneer insurgery, advised a considerable degree of love-play as adesirable preliminary to coitus. More recently Fiirbringer,in his treatise on sexual hygiene in marriage, consideredthat the physician should be competent to expound to hispatient the technique o conjugal intercourse. To returnto France, the land with which the art of love seems in thefirst place especially associated, it was in 1859 that Dr.Jules Guyot produced his Brdviaire de I'Amour Expdrimentalewhich most admirably presented the main pointsin the art of love, and was much later (1931) in parttranslated into English under the title of A Ritual forMarried Lovers.At this point we are brought back to the characteristicsof the sexual impulse in women, and to that sexual cold-