As a child of seven or eight she began to
experience what she describes as lightning-like sensations,
"mere, vague, uneasy feelings or momentary twitches, which took
place alike in the vulva or the vagina or the uterus, not
amounting to an orgasm and nothing like it." These sensations,
it should be added, have continued into adult life. "I always
experience them just before menstruation, and afterward for a few
days, and, occasionally, though it seems to me not so often,
during the period itself. I may have the sensation four or five
times during the day; it is not dependent at all upon external
impressions, or my own thoughts, and is sometimes absent for days
together. It is just one flash, as if you would snap your
fingers, and it is over."
As a child, she was, of course, quite unconscious that there was
anything sexual in these sensations. They were then usually
associated with various imaginary scenes. The one usually
indulged in was that a black bear was waiting for her up in a
tree, and that she was slowly raised up toward the bear by means
of ropes and then lowered again, and raised, feeling afraid of
being caught by the bear, and yet having a morbid desire to be
caught. In after years she realized that there was a physical
sexual cause underlying these imaginations, and that what she
liked was a feeling of resistance to the bear giving rise to the
physical sensation.
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