Benjamin Tarnowski

“ When the accustomed means of satisfying the morbid propensity has been interrupted by accidental circumstances, or the attack comes unawares upon the patient, he acts under the influence of an irresistible sensual impulse, and either employs violence, or takes so little precaution, that he draws the attention of people, gets taken up by the police, ruins his domestic happiness ; he loses his social standing and in a moment of despair commits suicide, or else appears on the prisoners' bench, to the great surprise of most of his friends. ”

“ It is of course beyond the actual state of our science, to distinguish between all possible cases of vice and of disease; we are similarly just as little able always to distinguish crime from psychosis. ”

“ Among men, who form more exclusively the subject of the present research, this form of sexual perversity is designated by the comprehensive expression of "Pederasty [1] Bestiality and Sodomy are, as we shall see further on, no more than variations of the above-mentioned abnormal genesic impulse.
The pederastic manifestations constitute the more definite and better studied group of sexual aberrations, as they are more often the subject of judicial investigation; and for this reason the most prominent place is given in the present work to Pederasty in the widest sense of the expression. ”

“ The physician appears naturally in his eyes more as an accuser than as a defender; and when, having made up his mind to undergo the sentence, he confesses the facts, he has no object to gain in making an avowal, one generally fraught with ill -con sequences to himself, of his perverted sexual instincts and the impulses that drive him to gratify his genesic sense in abnormal ways. ”

“ Not seldom their idol was only some brothel prostitute, who as for intercourse with them wanted only their money, or else some married woman who had never given the mad youth the slightest reason to suppose that she was at all inclined to allow him any intimacy whatever. ”

“ Under the influence of example, the wish not to be behindhand, to show their boldness, the unhappy youths conquer their repugnance to the filthy act, heat their imagination with pictures of women and at the same time indulge in pederasty. ”

“ This attractive feature of vice, which favours the imitation of morbid depravation, must lose its charm with the knowledge that vice in its most violent manifestations is the symptom of a morbid state, with a certain deadening, and not a refining of the feelings, and with an imperfect equilibrium of the nervous system which, far from leading to perfection, favours the development of mental disturbance and weakness of intellect. ”

“ The denomination periodical Perversion of the genesic sense in general, and periodical Pederasty in particular, appears to me best to represent the morbid disturbances in question, because they are in perfect analogy with the so-called periodical psychoses (mental disturbances) , those higher manifestations of psychical degeneracy, a degeneracy manifesting itself in occasional outbursts of mental disturbance, while there are long intervals between the attacks during which the mental powers exhibit a relatively normal activity. ”

“ Exact knowledge of the causes and conditions of development of sexual aberrations, and of the influence on them of hereditary constitution, education, the impressions of every-day life, and modern refined civilization, is the prerequisite for a rational prophylaxis of sexual aberrations, and for a correct sexual education. ”

“ It is, however, important, to note that not only different persons, though quite normally constituted, but also that different races may have a sexual impulse of greatly varied intensity.
In persons of a sensual temperament the genesic function is to them, during a certain period of their life, the main-spring of their existence. They sacrifice everything to satisfy their sexual impulse, which extinguishes all other desires. ”

“ The patient idolizes the object of his affection, adores it, sacrifices everything to it, thinks continually of it, sends letters, composes verses and becomes unsupportable to every one about him with perpetual talk of his love, his sufferings or his ecstasy. ”

“ Specialists for diseases of the genital organs are resorted to by such as find themselves suffering from any manifestations of organic anomaly, however slight, from arrested devel- opment or from the premonitory signs of incipient disease, when a diminution of the sexual power comes into prominence above all other symptoms, or finally when syphilitic infection makes an avowal inevitable of some perversity of the genesic sense of one sort or another. ”

“ THE genesic instinct presents itself in the human being previous to the development of sexual maturity, and in a healthy organism finds expression in an impulse towards persons of the opposite sex, an impulse which soon changes into a voluntary desire for the accomplishment of the sexual act which, as it becomes more developed, may attain to the degree of a continual sexual want. ”

“ In the latter, in most cases, the sexual desire will appear simultaneously with feelings of an impeding character, which in a healthy subject would suffice to damp his desire, such as, for instance, wickedness, anger or the wish to subject his victim to pain, to witness its suffer- ings, to hear its cries, to feel its death throes. ”

“ III. SEXUAL PERVERSION OF EPILEPTICS (EPILEPTIC PEDERASTY) As Epilepsy is one of the most distinctly marked forms of psychical degeneracy, it is obvious at the outset it must often manifest itself in conjunction with a perversion of the sexual instinct. It is now every day more evident that the special study of epileptic fits, the complicated disorders comprehended under the term " Epilepsy, " is far from being exhausted. ”

“ The principal object of nature is the propagation of the species, to her the individual is only a means.
Nature manifests her laws in this respect, in that she gives to those whose power of engendering strong and healthy children is declining a taste for pederasty. ”

“ The ease with which the patient admits the vicious satisfaction of his passion, the naivete of the relation itself, a certain absence of shame, indifference and neglect of the universally adopted forms of description of such matters all this must naturally appear strange to the attentive observer. ”