significance of either.  This feeling of want of power, mental or physical, always has the same effect.  I feel it if my eyes are blindfolded or my hands tied.  I don’t like to see the Washington Post dance, in which the man stands behind the woman and holds her hands, on that account.  If he held her wrists the feeling would be stronger, as her apparent helplessness would be increased.  The nervous irritability that is caused by being under restraint seems to manifest itself in that way, while in the case of mental disability the excitement, which should flow down a mental channel, being checked, seems to take a physical course instead.

“Possibly this would help to explain masochistic sexual feelings.  A physical cause working in the present would be preferable as an explanation to a psychological cause to be traced back through heredity to primitive conditions.  I believe such feelings are very common in men as well as in women, only people do not care to admit them, as a rule.”

The idea of being chained and fettered appears to be not uncommonly associated with pleasurable sexual feelings, for I have met with numerous cases in both men and women, and it not infrequently coexists with a tendency to inversion.  It often arises at a very early age, and it is of considerable interest because we cannot account for its frequency by any chance association nor by any actual experiences.  It would appear to be a purely psychic fantasia founded on the elementary physical fact that restraint of emotion, like suspension, produces a heightening of emotion.  In any case the spontaneous character of such ideas and emotions in children of both sexes suffices to show that they must possess a very definite organic basis.

In one of the histories (X) contained in Appendix B at the end of the present volume a lady describes how, as a child, she reveled in the idea of being chained and tortured, these ideas appearing to rise spontaneously.  In another case, that of A.N. (for the most part reproduced in “Erotic Symbolism,” in vol. v of these Studies), whose ideals are inverted and who is also affected by boot-fetichism, the idea of fetters is very attractive.  In this case self-excitement was produced at a very early age, without the use of the hands, by strapping the legs together.  We can, however, scarcely explain away the idea of fetters in this case as merely the result of an early association, for it may well be argued that the idea led to this method of self-excitement.  “The mere idea of fetters,” this subject writes, “produces the greatest excitement, and the sight of pictures representing such things is a temptation.  The reading of books dealing with prison life, etc., anywhere where physical restraint is treated of, is a temptation.  The temptation is aggravated when the picture represents the person booted.  I suppose all this will have been intensified in my case by my practices as