in masturbation has been a main cause, not necessarily the sole efficient cause, in producing a divorce in later life between the physical sensuous impulses and the ideal emotions.  The sensuous impulse having been evolved and perverted before the manifestation of the higher emotion, the two groups of feelings have become divorced for the whole of life.  This is a common source of much personal misery and family unhappiness, though at the same time the clash of contending impulses may lead to a high development of moral character.  When early masturbation is a factor in producing sexual inversion it usually operates in the manner I have here indicated, the repulsion for normal coitus helping to furnish a soil on which the inverted impulse may develop unimpeded.

This point has not wholly escaped previous observers, though they do not seem to have noted its psychological mechanism.  Tissot stated that masturbation causes an aversion to marriage.  More recently, Loiman ("Ueber Onanismus beim Weibe,” Therapeutische Monatshefte, April, 1890) considered that masturbation in women, leading to a perversion of sexual feeling, including inability to find satisfaction in coitus, affects the associated centres.  Smith Baker, again ("The Neuropsychical Element in Conjugal Aversion,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, September, 1892), finds that a “source of marital aversion seems to lie in the fact that substitution of mechanical and iniquitous excitations affords more thorough satisfaction than the mutual legitimate ones do,” and gives cases in point.  Savill, also, who believes that masturbation is more common in women than is usually supposed, regards dyspareunia, or pain in coition, as one of the signs of the habit.

Masturbation in women thus becomes, as Raymond and Janet point out (Les Obsessions, vol. ii, p. 307) a frequent cause of sexual frigidity in marriage.  These authors illustrate the train of evils which may thus be set up, by the case of a lady, 26 years of age, a normal woman, of healthy family, who, at the age of 15, was taught by a servant to masturbate.  At the age of 18 she married.  She loved her husband, but she had no sexual feelings in coitus, and she continued to masturbate, sometimes several times a day, without evil consequences.  At 24 she had to go into a hospital for floating kidney, and was so obliged to stop masturbating.  She here accidentally learnt of the evil results attributed to the habit.  She resolved not to do it again, and she kept her resolution.  But while still in hospital she fell wildly in love with a man.  To escape from the constant thought of this man, she sought relations with her husband, and at times masturbated, but now it no longer gave her pleasure.  She wished to give up sexual things altogether.  But that was easier said than done.  She became subject to nervous crises, often brought on by the sight of a man, and accompanied by sexual excitement.