Briquet pointed out that hysteria is rare among nuns
and frequent among prostitutes. Krafft-Ebing believed that most
hysterical women are not anxious for sexual satisfaction, and declared
that "hysteria caused through the non-satisfaction of the coarse sensual
sexual impulse I have never seen,"[268] while Pitres and others refer to
the frequently painful nature of sexual hallucinations in the hysterical.
But it soon becomes obvious that the psychic sexual sphere is not confined
to the gratification of conscious physical sexual desire. It is not true
that hysteria is rare among nuns, some of the most tremendous epidemics of
hysteria, and the most carefully studied, having occurred in
convents,[269] while the hysterical phenomena sometimes associated with
revivals are well known. The supposed prevalence among prostitutes would
not be evidence against the sexual relationships of hysteria; it has,
however, been denied, even by so great an authority as Parent-Duchatelet
who found it very rare, even in prostitutes in hospitals, when it was
often associated with masturbation; in prostitutes, however, who returned
to a respectable life, giving up their old habits, he found hysteria
common and severe.[270] The frequent absence of physical sexual feeling,
again, may quite reasonably be taken as evidence of a disorder of the
sexual emotions, while the undoubted fact that sexual intercourse usually
has little beneficial effect on pronounced hysteria, and that sexual
excitement during sleep and sexual hallucinations are often painful in
the same condition, is far from showing that injury or repression of the
sexual emotions had nothing to do with the production of the hysteria.
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