cause loss of breath; in a state of suspension the imagination would suggest the idea of falling and the attendant loss of breath.  People suffering from lung disease are often erotically inclined, and anesthetics affect the breathing.  Men also seem to like the idea of suspension, but from the active side.  One man used to put his wife on a high swinging shelf when she displeased him, and my husband told me once he would like to suspend me to a crane we were watching at work, though I have never mentioned my own feeling on this point to him.  Suspension is often mentioned in descriptions of torture.  Beatrice Cenci was hung up by her hair and the recently murdered Queen of Korea was similarly treated.  In Tolstoi’s My Husband and I the girl says she would like her husband to hold her over a precipice.  That passage gave me great pleasure.[127]

“The idea of slipping off an inclined plane gives me the same sensation.  I always feel it on seeing Michael Angelo’s ‘Night,’ though the slipping look displeases me artistically.  I remember that when I saw the ‘Night’ first I did feel excited and was annoyed, and it seemed to me it was the slipping-off look that gave it; but I think I am now less affected by that idea.  Certain general ideas seem to excite one, but the particular forms under which they are presented lose their effect and have to be varied.  The sentence mentioned in Tolstoi leaves me now quite cold, but if I came across the same idea elsewhere, expressed differently, then it would excite me.  I am very capricious in the small things, and I think women are so more than men.  The idea of slipping down a plank formerly produced excitement with me; now it has a less vivid effect, though the idea of loss of breath still produces excitement.  The idea of the plank does not now affect me unless there is a certain amount of drapery.  I think, therefore, that the feeling must come in part from the possibility of the drapery catching on some roughness of the surface of the slope, and so producing pressure on the sexual organs.  The effect is still produced, however, even without any clothing, if the slope is supposed to end in a deep drop, so that the idea of falling is strongly presented.  I cannot recollect any early associations that would tend to explain these feelings, except that jumping from a height, which I used frequently to do as a child, has a tendency to create excitement.

“With me, I may add, it is when I cannot express myself, or am trying to understand what I feel is beyond my grasp, that the first stage of sexual excitement results.  For instance, I never get excited in thinking over sexual questions, because my ideas, correct or incorrect, are fairly clear and definite.  But I often feel sexually excited over that question of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, not because I can’t decide between the two sets of evidence, but because I don’t feel confident of having fully grasped the true