Recent authorities are almost unanimous in rejecting masturbation
as a cause of insanity. Thus, Rohleder, in his comprehensive
monograph (_Die Masturbation_, 1899, pp. 185-92), although taking
a very serious view of the evil results of masturbation, points
out the unanimity which is now tending to prevail on this point,
and lays it down that "masturbation is never the direct cause of
insanity." Sexual excesses of any kind, he adds (following
Curschmann), can, at the most, merely give an impetus to a latent
form of insanity. On the whole, he concludes, the best
authorities are unanimous in agreeing that masturbation may
certainly injure mental capacity, by weakening memory and
depressing intellectual energy; that, further, in hereditarily
neurotic subjects, it may produce slight psychoses like _folie du
doute_, hypochondria, hysteria; that, finally, under no
circumstances can it produce severe psychoses like paranoia or
general paralysis. "If it caused insanity, as often as some
claim," as Kellogg remarks, "the whole race would long since have
passed into masturbatic degeneracy of mind.... It is especially
injurious in the very young, and in all who have weak nervous
systems," but "the physical traits attributed to the habit are
common to thousands of neurasthenic and neurotic individuals."
(Kellogg, _A Text-book of Mental Diseases_, 1897, pp.
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