perhaps more especially women, the love-bite is really associated with a conscious desire, even if more or less restrained, to draw blood, a real delight in this process, a love of blood.  Probably this only occurs in persons who are not absolutely normal, but on the borderland of the abnormal.  We have to admit that this craving has, however, a perfectly normal basis.  There is scarcely any natural object with so profoundly emotional an effect as blood, and it is very easy to understand why this should be so.[101] Moreover, blood enters into the sphere of courtship by virtue of the same conditions by which cruelty enters into it; they are both accidents of combat, and combat is of the very essence of animal and primitive human courtship, certainly its most frequent accompaniment.  So that the repelling or attracting fascination of blood may be regarded as a by-product of normal courtship, which, like other such by-products, may become an essential element of abnormal courtship.[102]

Normally the fascination of blood, if present at all during sexual excitement, remains more or less latent, either because it is weak or because the checks that inhibit it are inevitably very powerful.  Occasionally it becomes more clearly manifest, and this may happen early in life.  Fere records the case of a man of Anglo-Saxon origin, of sound heredity so far as could be ascertained and presenting no obvious stigmata of degeneration, who first experienced sexual manifestations at the age of 5 when a boy cousin was attacked by bleeding at the nose.  It was the first time he had seen such a thing and he experienced erection and much pleasure at the sight.  This was repeated the next time the cousin’s nose bled and also whenever he witnessed any injuries or wounds, especially when occurring in males.  A few years later he began to find pleasure in pinching and otherwise inflicting slight suffering.  This sadism was not, however, further developed, although a tendency to inversion persisted.[103]

Somewhat similar may have been the origin of the attraction of blood in a case which has been reported to me of a youth of 17, the youngest of a large family who are all very strong and entirely normal.  He is himself, however, delicate, overgrown, with a narrow chest, a small head, and babyish features, while mentally he is backward, with very defective memory and scant powers of assimilation.  He is intensely nervous, peevish, and subject to fits of childish rage.  He takes violent fancies to persons of his own sex.  But he appears to have only one way of obtaining sexual excitement and gratification.  It is his custom to get into a hot bath and there to produce erection and emission, not by masturbation, but by thinking of flowing blood.  He does not associate himself with the causation of this imaginary flow of blood; he is merely the passive but pleased spectator.  He is aware of his peculiarity and endeavors to shake it off, but his efforts to obtain normal pleasure by thinking of a girl are vain.

    I may here narrate a case which has been communicated to me of
    algolagnia in a woman, combined with sexual hyperesthesia.