In civilized life one but rarely feels it.  A woman’s pleasure in being afraid of a husband or lover may be an equivalent of a man’s love of adventure; and the fear of children for their parents may be the dawning of the love of adventure.  In a woman this desire of adventure receives a serious check when she begins to realize what she might be subjected to by a man if she gratified it.  Excessive fear is demoralizing, but it seems to me that the idea of being whipped gives a sense of fear which is not excessive.  It is almost the only kind of pain (physical) which is inflicted on children or women by persons whom they can love and trust, and with a moral object.  Any other kind of bodily ill treatment suggests malignity and may rouse resentment, and, in extreme cases, an excess of fear which goes beyond the limits of pleasurable excitement.  Given a hereditary feeling of this sort, I think it is helped by the want of actual experience, as the association with excitement is freed from the idea of pain as such.”  In his very valuable and suggestive study of fears, Stanley Hall, while recognizing the evil of excessive fear, has emphasized the emotional and even the intellectual benefits of fear, and the great part played by fear in the evolution of the race as “the rudimentary organ on the full development and subsequent reduction of which many of the best things in the soul are dependent.”  “Fears that paralyze some brains,” he remarks, “are a good tonic for others.  In some form and degree all need it always.  Without the fear apparatus in us, what a wealth of motive would be lost!"[148]

It is on the basis of this tonic influence of fear that in some morbidly sensitive natures fear acts as a sexual stimulant.  Cullerre has brought together a number of cases in both men and women, mostly neurasthenic, in which fits of extreme anxiety and dread, sometimes of a religious character and often in highly moral people, terminate in spontaneous orgasm or in masturbation.[149]

Professor Gurlitt mentions that his first full sexual emission took place in class at school, when he was absorbed in writing out the life of Aristides and very anxious lest he should not be able to complete it within the set time.[150]

Dread and anxiety not only excite sexual emotion, but in the more extreme morbid cases they may suppress and replace it.  Terror, say Fliess, is transmuted coitus, and Freud believes that the neurosis of anxiety always has a sexual cause, while Ballet, Capgras, Loewenfeld, and others, though not regarding a sexual traumatism as the only cause, still regard it as frequent.

It is worthy of note that not only fear, but even so depressing an emotion as grief, may act as a sexual stimulant, more especially in women.  This fact is not sufficiently recognized, though probably everyone can recall instances from his personal knowledge, such cases being generally regarded as inexplicable.  It is, however, not more surprising that grief should be transformed into sexual emotion than that (as in a case recorded by Stanley Hall) it should manifest itself as anger.  In any case we have to bear in mind the frequency of this psychological transformation in the presence of cases which might otherwise seem to call for a cynical interpretation.