feet folded, a position I almost always find myself in when I awake, no matter in which position I may go to sleep.  Very soon I awoke from this slumber with a most delightful sensation, every fibre tingling with an exquisite glow of warmth.  I was lying on my left side (something I am never able to do), and was folded in the arms of my counterpart.  Unless you have seen it, I cannot give you an idea of the beauty of his flesh, and with what joy I beheld and felt it.  Think of it, luminous flesh; and Oh! such tints, you never could imagine without seeing.  He folded me so closely in his arms,” etc.  In such cases there is no conflict between the physical and the psychic, and therefore the resulting excitement is pleasurable and not painful.

At this point our study of auto-erotism brings us into the sphere of mysticism.  Leuba, in a penetrating and suggestive essay on Christian mysticism, after quoting the present Study, refers to the famous passages in which St. Theresa describes how a beautiful little angel inserted a flame-tipped dart into her heart until it descended into her bowels and left her inflamed with divine love.  “What physiological difference,” he asks, “is there between this voluptuous sensation and that enjoyed by the disciple of the Brotherhood of New Life?  St. Theresa says ‘bowels,’ the woman doctor says ‘womb,’ that is all."[250]

The extreme form of auto-erotism is the tendency for the sexual emotion to be absorbed and often entirely lost in self-admiration.  This Narcissus-like tendency, of which the normal germ in women is symbolized by the mirror, is found in a minor degree in some men, and is sometimes well marked in women, usually in association with an attraction for other persons, to which attraction it is, of course, normally subservient.  “The mirror,” remarks Bloch (Beitraege 1, p. 201), “plays an important part in the genesis of sexual aberration....  It cannot be doubted that many a boy and girl have first experienced sexual excitement at the sight of their own bodies in a mirror.”

Valera, the Spanish novelist, very well described this impulse in his Genio y Figura.  Rafaela, the heroine of this novel, says that, after her bath:  “I fall into a puerility which may be innocent or vicious, I cannot decide.  I only know that it is a purely contemplative act, a disinterested admiration of beauty.  It is not coarse sensuality, but aesthetic platonism.  I imitate Narcissus; and I apply my lips to the cold surface of the mirror and kiss my image.  It is the love of beauty, the expression of tenderness and affection for what God has made manifest, in an ingenuous kiss imprinted on the empty and incorporeal reflection.”  In the same spirit the real heroine of the Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (p. 114), at the point when she was about to become a prostitute, wrote:  “I am pretty.  It gives me pleasure to throw off my clothes, one by one, before the mirror, and to look at