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

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXsensitiveness of the skin, and the existence of erogeniczones.The importanceof the erotic interest in the breasts isindicated bythe amount of attention which has beengiven to the subject by Catholic theologians. A great controversyarose over xnammillary contacts in the eighteenthcentury. Eminent Jesuit theologians, but in opposition tothe Inquisition and the Church generally, maintained thatto handle the breasts even of nuns was venial, providedthere was no depraved intention. In one Jesuit Penitentiaryit was even asserted that to deny the intrinsic innocenceof such acts was dangerously near to an error infaith,and only committed by Jansenists.(2)SmellOlfactory sensibility was not at first clearly differentiatedfrom general tactile sensibility. The sense of smellwas gradually specialized, and, when taste also began todevelop, a kind of chemical sense was constituted. Amongvertebrates smell became the most highly developed ofthe senses; it gives the first information of remote objectsthat concern them, it gives the most precise informationconcerning the near objects that concern them; it is thesense in terms of which most of their mental operationsmust be conducted and their emotional impulses reachconsciousness. For reptiles and later for mammals notonly are all sexual associations mainly olfactory, but theimpressions received by this sense suffice to dominate allothers. An animal not only receives adequate sexual excitementfrom olfactory stimuli, but those stimuli oftensuffice to counterbalance all the evidence o the othersenses. This is not surprising when we remember howextensive is the place of the olfactory region in the brain.The cerebral cortex itself, indeed, as Edinger and Elliot[50]