need. "As the youth develops, onanism becomes a sexual act comparable to coitus as a dream is comparable to reality, imagery forming in correspondence with the desires. In its fully developed form in adolescence," Venturi continues, "masturbation has an almost hallucinatory character; onanism at this period psychically approximates to the true sexual act, and passes insensibly into it. If, however, continued on into adult age, it becomes morbid, passing into erotic fetichism; what in the inexperienced youth is the natural auxiliary and stimulus to imagination, in the degenerate onanist of adult age is a sign of arrested development. Thus, onanism," the author concludes, "is not always a vice such as is fiercely combated by educators and moralists. It is the natural transition by which we reach the warm and generous love of youth, and, in natural succession to this, the tranquil, positive, matrimonial love of the mature man." (Silvio Venturi, Le Degenerazioni Psico-sessuale, 1892, pp. 6–9.)
It may be questioned whether this view is acceptable even for the warm climate of the south of Europe, where the impulses of sexuality are undoubtedly precocious. It is certainly not in harmony with general experience and opinion in the north; this is well expressed in the following passage by Edward Carpenter (International Journal of Ethics, July, 1899): "After all, purity (in the sense of continence) is of the first importance to boyhood. To prolong the period of continence in a boy's life is to prolong the period of growth. This is a simple physiological law, and a very obvious one; and, whatever other things may be said in favor of purity, it remains, perhaps, the most weighty. To introduce sensual and sexual habits—and one of the worst of them is self-abuse—at an early age, is to arrest growth, both physical and mental. And what is even more, it means to arrest the capacity for affection. All experience shows that the early outlet toward sex cheapens and weakens affectional capacity."
I do not consider that we can decide the precise degree in which masturbation may fairly be called normal so long as we take masturbation by itself. We are thus, in conclusion, brought back to the point which I sought to emphasize at the outset: masturbation belongs to a group of auto-erotic phenomena. From one point of view it may be said that all auto-erotic phenomena are unnatural, since the natural aim of the sexual impulse is sexual conjunction, and all exercise of that impulse outside such conjunction is away from the end of Nature. But we do not live in a state of Nature which answers to such demands; all our life is "unnatural." And as soon as we begin to restrain the free play of sexual impulse toward sexual ends, at once auto-erotic phenomena inevitably spring up on every side. There is no end to them; it is impossible to say what finest elements in art, in morals, in civilization generally, may not really be rooted in an auto-erotic impulse. "Without a certain overheating of the sexual system," said Nietzsche, "we could not have a Raphael." Auto-erotic phenomena are inevitable. It is our wisest course to recognize this inevitableness of sexual and transmuted sexual manifestations under the perpetual restraints of civilized life, and, while avoiding any attitude of excessive indulgence or indifference,[352] to avoid also any attitude of excessive horror, for our horror not only leads to the facts being effectually veiled from our sight, but itself serves to manufacture artificially a greater evil than that which we seek to combat.
The sexual impulse is not, as some have imagined, the sole root of the most massive human emotions, the most brilliant human aptitudes—of sympathy, of art, of religion. In the complex human organism, where all the parts are so many-fibred and so closely interwoven, no great manifestation can be reduced to one single source. But it largely enters into and molds all of these emotions and aptitudes, and that by virtue of its two most peculiar characteristics: it is, in the first place, the deepest and most volcanic of human impulses, and, in the second place—unlike the only other human impulse with which it can be compared, the nutritive impulse—it can, to a large extent, be transmuted into a new force capable of the strangest and most various uses. So that in the presence of all these manifestations we may assert that in a real sense, though subtly mingled with very diverse elements, auto-erotism everywhere plays its part. In the phenomena of auto-erotism, when we take a broad view of those phenomena, we are concerned, not with a form of insanity, not necessarily with a form of depravity, but with the inevitable by-products of that mighty process on which the animal creation rests.
[289] For a bibliography of masturbation, see Rohleder, Die Masturbation, pp. 11–18; also, Arthur MacDonald, Le Criminel Type, pp. 227 et seq.; cf. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. i, pp. 432 et seq.
[290] Oskar Berger, Archiv für Psychiatrie, Bd. 6, 1876.
[291] Die Masturbation, p. 41.
[292] Dukes, Preservation of Health, 1884, p. 150.
[293] G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. i, p. 434.
[294] F. S. Brockman, "A Study of the Moral and Religious Life of Students in the United States," Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1902. Many pitiful narratives are reproduced.
[295] Moraglia, "Die Onanie beim normalen Weibe und bei den Prostituten," Zeitschrift für Criminal-Anthropologie, 1897, p. 489. It should be added that Moraglia is not a very critical investigator. It is probable, however, that on this point his results are an approximation to the truth.
[296] Ernst, "Anthropological Researches on the Population of Venezuela," Memoirs of the Anthropological Society, vol. iii, 1870, p. 277.
[297] Niceforo, Il Gergo nei Normali, etc., 1897, cap. V.
[298] Debreyne, Mœchialogie, p. 64. Yet theologians and casuists, Debreyne remarks, frequently never refer to masturbation in women.
[299] Stanley Hall, op. cit., vol. i, p. 34. Hall mentions, also, that masturbation is specially common among the blind.
[300] Moraglia, Archivio di Psichiatria, vol. xvi, fasc. 4 and 5, p. 313.
[301] See his careful study, "Die Sexuellen Perversitäten in der Irrenanstalt," Psychiatrische Bladen, No. 2. 1899.
[302] Venturi, Degenerazioni Psico-sessuali, pp. 105, 133, 148, 152.
[303] J. P. West, Transactions of the Ohio Pediatric Society, 1895. Abstract in Medical Standard, November, 1895; cases are also recorded by J. T. Winter, "Self-abuse in Infancy and Childhood," American Journal Obstetrics, June, 1902.
[304] Freud, Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, pp. 36 et seq.
[305] G. E. Shuttleworth, British Medical Journal, October 3, 1903.