As the foregoing case indicates, horses, and especially running or struggling horses, sometimes have the same effect in stimulating the sexual emotions, especially on persons predisposed by neurotic heredity, as we have found that the spectacle of pain possesses.  A medical correspondent in New Zealand tells me of a patient of his own, a young carpenter of 26, not in good health, who had never masturbated or had connection with a woman.  He lived in a room overlooking a livery-stable yard where was kept, among other animals, a large black horse.  Nearly every night he had a dream in which he seemed to be pursuing this large black horse, and when he caught it, which he invariably did, there was a copious emission.  A holiday in the country and tonic treatment dispelled the dreams and reduced the nocturnal emissions to normal frequency.  Fere has recorded a case of a boy, of neuropathic heredity, who, when 14 years of age, was one day about to practise mutual masturbation with another boy of his own age.  They were seated on a hillside overlooking a steep road, and at this moment a heavy wagon came up the road drawn by four horses, which struggled painfully up, encouraged by the cries and the whip of the driver.  This sight increased the boy’s sexual excitement, which reached its climax when one of the horses suddenly fell.  He had never before experienced such intense excitement, and always afterward a similar spectacle of struggling horses produced a similar effect.[135]

In this connection reference may be made to the frequency with which dreams of struggling horses occur in connection with disturbance or disease of the heart.  In such cases it is clear that the struggling horses seem to dream-consciousness to embody and explain the panting struggles to which the heart is subjected.  They become, as it were, a visual symbol of the cardiac oppression.  In much the same way, it would appear, under the influence of sexual excitement, in which cardiac disturbance is one of the chief constituent elements, the struggling horses became a sexual symbol, and, having attained that position, they are henceforth alone adequate to produce sexual excitement.

FOOTNOTES: 

[128] This opinion appears to be in harmony with the conclusions of Eulenburg, who has devoted special study to De Sade, and points out that the ordinary conception of “sadism” is much too narrow. (Eulenburg, Sexuale Neuropathie, 1895, p. 110 et seq.)

[129] Casanova, Memoires, vol. viii, pp. 74-76.  Goncourt in his Journal, under date of April, 1862 (vol. ii, p. 27), tells a story of an Englishman who engaged a room overlooking a scaffold where a murderer was to be hanged, proposing to take a woman with him and to avail himself of the excitement aroused by the scene.  This scheme was frustrated by the remission of the death penalty.

[130] Alienist and Neurologist, May, 1907, p. 204.