In the detailed
history which Moll presents, of the sexual experiences of a sister in an
American nursing guild,--a most instructive history of a woman fairly
normal except for the results of repressed sexual emotion, and with strong
moral tendencies,--various episodes are narrated well illustrating the way
in which sexual excitement becomes unpleasant or even painful when it
takes place as a physical reflex which the emotions and intellect are all
the time struggling against.[247] It is quite probable, however, that
there is a physiological, as well as a psychic, factor in this phenomenon,
and Sollier, in his elaborate study of the nature and genesis of hysteria,
by insisting on the capital importance of the disturbance of sensibility
in hysteria, and the definite character of the phenomena produced in the
passage between anaesthesia and normal sensation, has greatly helped to
reveal the mechanism of this feature of auto-erotic excitement in the
hysterical.
No doubt there has been a tendency to exaggerate the unpleasant character
of the auto-erotic phenomena of hysteria. That tendency was an inevitable
reaction against an earlier view, according to which hysteria was little
more than an unconscious expression of the sexual emotions and as such was
unscientifically dismissed without any careful investigation. I agree with
Breuer and Freud that the sexual needs of the hysterical are just as
individual and various as those of normal women, but that they suffer from
them more, largely through a moral struggle with their own instincts, and
the attempt to put them into the background of consciousness.
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