When masturbation was the result of an erotic dream (which occurred but seldom), the first stage was already reached in sleep, and the second was more quickly obtained.  During the act it was only occasionally that any thoughts of men or of coitus were present, the attention being fixed on the coming climax.  The psychic state afterwards was usually one of self-reproach. (O.  Adler, Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes, 1904, pp. 26-29.) The phenomena in this case may be regarded as fairly typical, but there are many individual variations; mucus emissions and vaginal contractions frequently occur before actual orgasm, and there is not usually any insertion of the finger into the vagina in women who have never experienced coitus, or, indeed, even in those who have.

We must now turn to that aspect of our subject which in the past has always seemed the only aspect of auto-erotic phenomena meriting attention:  the symptoms and results of chronic masturbation.  It appears to have been an Englishman who, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, first called popular attention to the supposed evils of masturbation.  His book was published in London, and entitled:  Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences in both Sexes, Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice, etc.  It is not a serious medical treatise, but an early and certainly superior example of a kind of literature which we have since become familiar with through the daily newspapers.  A large part of the book, which is cleverly written, is devoted in the later editions to the letters of nervous and hypochondriacal young men and women, who are too shy to visit the author, but request him to send a bottle of his “Strengthening Tincture,” and mention that they are inclosing half a guinea, a guinea, or still larger sum.  Concerning the composition of the “Strengthening Tincture” we are not informed.[316] This work, which was subsequently attributed to a writer named Bekkers, is said to have passed through no less than eighty editions, and it was translated into German.  Tissot, a physician of Lausanne, followed with his Traite de l’Onanisme:  Dissertation sur les Maladies produites par la Masturbation, first published in Latin (1760), then in French (1764), and afterward in nearly all European languages.  He regarded masturbation as a crime, and as “an act of suicide.”  His book is a production of amusing exaggeration and rhetoric, zealously setting forth the prodigious evils of masturbation in a style which combines, as Christian remarks, the strains of Rousseau with a vein of religious piety.  Tissot included only manual self-abuse under the term “onanism;” shortly afterward, Voltaire, in his Dictionnaire Philosophique, took up the subject, giving it a wider meaning and still further popularizing it.  Finally Lallemand, at a somewhat later period (1836), wrote a book which was, indeed, more scientific in