"[395] "Closely connected with
salacity, particularly in women," remarks Conolly Norman, when discussing
mania (Tuke's _Dictionary of Psychological Medicine_), "is religious
excitement.... Ecstasy, as we see in cases of acute mental disease, is
probably always connected with sexual excitement, if not with sexual
depravity. The same association is constantly seen in less extreme cases,
and one of the commonest features in the conversation of an acutely
maniacal woman is the intermingling of erotic and religious ideas."
"Patients who believe," remarks Clara Barrus, "that they are the Virgin
Mary, the bride of Christ, the Church, 'God's wife,' and 'Raphael's
consort,' are sure, sooner or later, to disclose symptoms which show that
they are some way or other sexually depraved."[396] Forel, who devotes a
chapter of his book _Die Sexuelle Frage_, to the subject, argues that the
strongest feelings of religious emotion are often unconsciously rooted in
erotic emotion or represent a transformation of such emotion; and, in an
interesting discussion (Ch. VI) of this question in his _Sexualleben
unserer Zeit_, Bloch states that "in a certain sense we may describe the
history of religions as the history of a special manifestation of the
human sexual instinct." Ball, Brouardel, Morselli, Vallon and Marie,[397]
C.H. Hughes,[398] to mention but a few names among many, have emphasized
the same point.
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