It will not have escaped the careful reader that in following out our subject we have sometimes been brought into contact with manifestations which scarcely seem to come within any definition of pain.  This is undoubtedly so, and the references to these manifestations were not accidental, for they serve to indicate the real bearings of our subject.  The relationships of love and pain constitute a subject at once of so much gravity and so much psychological significance that it was well to devote to them a special study.  But pain, as we have here to understand it, largely constitutes a special case of what we shall later learn to know as erotic symbolism:  that is to say, the psychic condition in which a part of the sexual process, a single idea or group of ideas, tends to assume unusual importance, or even to occupy the whole field of sexual consciousness, the part becoming a symbol that stands for the whole.  When we come to the discussion of this great group of abnormal sexual manifestations it will frequently be necessary to refer to the results we have reached in studying the sexual significance of pain.

FOOTNOTES: 

[154] See, for instance, the section “Zur Physiologie der Kunst” in Nietzsche’s fragmentary work, Der Wille zur Macht, Werke, Bd. xv.  Groos (Spiele der Menschen, p. 89) refers to the significance of the fact that nearly all races have special methods of procuring intoxication.  Cf.  Partridge’s study of the psychology of alcohol (American Journal of Psychology, April, 1900).  “It is hard to imagine,” this writer remarks of intoxicants, “what the religious or social consciousness of primitive man would have been without them.”

[155] The muscular element is the most conspicuous in emotion, though it is not possible, as a careful student of the emotions (H.R.  Marshall, Pain, Pleasure, and AEsthetics, p. 84) well points out, “to limit the physical activities involved with the emotions to such effects of voluntary innervation or alteration of size of blood-vessels or spasm of organic muscle, as Lange seems to think determines them; nor to increase or decrease of muscle-power, as Fere’s results might suggest; nor to such changes, in relation of size of capillaries, in voluntary innervation, in respiratory and heart functioning, as Lehmann has observed.  Emotions seem to me to be coincidents of reactions of the whole organism tending to certain results.”

THE SEXUAL IMPULSE IN WOMEN.