if erotic, make an enormous impression on her; in the morning she is bad-tempered if they were unpleasant, while she feels lascivious and gives herself up to masturbation if she has had erotic dreams of men; she then has a feeling of pleasure throughout the day, and her sexual organs are bathed with moisture.[244] Pitres and Gilles de la Tourette, two of Charcot’s most distinguished pupils, in their elaborate works on hysteria, both consider that dreams generally have a great influence on the waking life of the hysterical, and they deal with the special influence of erotic dreams, to which, doubtless, we must refer those conceptions of incubi and succubi which played so vast and so important a part in the demonology of the Middle Ages, and while not unknown in men were most frequent in women.  Such erotic dreams—­as these observers, confirming the experience of old writers, have found among the hysterical to-day—­are by no means always, or even usually, of a pleasurable character.  “It is very rare,” Pitres remarks, when insisting on the sexual character of the hallucinations of the hysterical, “for these erotic hallucinations to be accompanied by agreeable voluptuous sensations.  In most cases the illusion of sexual intercourse even provokes acute pain.  The witches of old times nearly all affirmed that in their relations with the devil they suffered greatly.[245] They said that his organ was long and rough and pointed, with scales which lifted on withdrawal and tore the vagina.” (It seems probable, I may remark, that the witches’ representations, both of the devil and of sexual intercourse, were largely influenced by familiarity with the coupling of animals).  As Gilles de la Tourette is careful to warn his readers, we must not too hastily assume, from the prevalence of nocturnal auto-erotic phenomena in hysterical women, that such women are necessarily sexual and libidinous in excess; the disorder is in them psychic, he points out, and not physical, and they usually receive sexual approaches with indifference and repugnance, because their sexual centres are anaesthetic or hyperaesthetic.  “During the period of sexual activity they seek much more the care and delicate attention of men than the genital act, which they often only tolerate.  Many households, begun under the happiest auspices—­the bride all the more apt to believe that she loves her betrothed in virtue of her suggestibility, easily exalted, perhaps at the expense of the senses—­become hells on earth.  The sexual act has for the hysterical woman more than one disillusion; she cannot understand it; it inspires her with insurmountable repugnance."[246] I refer to these hysterical phenomena because they present to us, in an extreme form, facts which are common among women whom, under the artificial conditions of civilized life, we are compelled to regard as ordinarily healthy and normal.  The frequent painfulness of auto-erotic phenomena is by no means an exclusively hysterical phenomenon, although often seen in a heightened