I cared for I put his hands on my throat and implored him to kill me.  It was a moment of madness, which helps me to understand the feelings of a person always insane.  Even now that I am cool and collected I know that if I were deeply in love with a man who I thought was going to kill me, especially in that way, I would make no effort to save myself beforehand, though, of course, in the final moments nature would assert herself without my volition.  What makes the horror of such cases in insanity is the fact of the love being left out.  But I think I find no greater difficulty in picturing the mental attitude of a sadistic lunatic than that of a normal man who gets pleasure out of women for whom he has no love.”

The imagined pleasure of being strangled by a lover brings us to a group of feelings which would seem to be not unconnected with respiratory elements.  I refer to the pleasurable excitement experienced by some in suspension, swinging, restraint, and fetters.  Strangulation is the extreme and most decided type of this group of imagined or real situations, in all of which a respiratory disturbance seems to be an essential element.[126]

In explaining these phenomena we have to remark that respiratory excitement has always been a conspicuous part of the whole process of tumescence and detumescence, of the struggles of courtship and of its climax, and that any restraint upon respiration, or, indeed, any restraint upon muscular and emotional activity generally, tends to heighten the state of sexual excitement associated with such activity.

I have elsewhere, when studying the spontaneous solitary manifestation of the sexual instinct (Auto-erotism, in vol. i of these Studies), referred to the pleasurably emotional, and sometimes sexual, effects of swinging and similar kinds of movement.  It is possible that there is a certain significance in the frequency with which the eighteenth-century French painters, who lived at a time when the refinements of sexual emotion were carefully sought out, have painted women in the act of swinging.  Fragonard mentions that in 1763 a gentleman invited him into the country, with the request to paint his mistress, especially stipulating that she should be depicted in a swing.  The same motive was common among the leading artists of that time.  It may be said that this attitude was merely a pretext to secure a vision of ankles, but that result could easily have been attained without the aid of the swing.

I may here quote, as bearing on this and allied questions, a somewhat lengthy communication from a lady to whom I am indebted for many subtle and suggestive remarks on the whole of this group of manifestations:—­

“With regard to the connection between swinging and suspension, perhaps the physical basis of it is the loss of breath.  Temporary loss of breath with me produces excitement.  Swinging at a height or a fall from a height would