be without any conscious desire for actual coitus.  But if we realize to how large an extent woman is a sexual organism, and how diffused and even unconscious the sexual impulses may be, it becomes very difficult to assert that she has never shown any manifestation of the sexual impulse.  All we can assert with some degree of positiveness in some cases is that she has not manifested sexual gratification, more particularly as shown by the occurrence of the orgasm, but that is very far indeed from warranting us to assert that she never will experience such gratification or still less that she is organically incapable of experiencing it.[160] It is therefore quite impossible to follow Adler when he asks us to accept the existence of a condition which he solemnly terms anaesthesia sexualis completa idiopathica, in which there is no mechanical difficulty in the way or psychic inhibition, but an “absolute” lack of sexual sensibility and a complete absence of sexual inclination.[161]

It is instructive to observe that Adler himself knows no “pure” case of this condition.  To find such a case he has to go back nearly two centuries to Madame de Warens, to whom he devotes a whole chapter.  He has, moreover, had the courage in writing this chapter to rely entirely on Rousseau’s Confessions, which were written nearly half a century later than the episodes they narrated, and are therefore full of inaccuracies, besides being founded on an imperfect and false knowledge of Madame de Warens’s earlier life, and written by a man who was, there can be no doubt, not able to arouse women’s passions.  Adler shows himself completely ignorant of the historical investigations of De Montet, Mugnier, Ritter, and others which, during recent years, have thrown a flood of light on the life and character of Madame de Warens, and not even acquainted with the highly significant fact that she was hysterical.[162] This is the basis of “fact” on which we are asked to accept anaesthesia sexualis completa idiopathica![163]

“In dealing with the alleged absence of the sexual impulse,” a well-informed medical correspondent writes from America, “much caution has to be used in accepting statements as to its absence, from the fact that most women fear by the admission to place themselves in an impure category.  I am also satisfied that influx of women into universities, etc., is often due to the sexual impulse causing restlessness, and that this factor finds expression in the prurient prudishness so often presenting itself in such women, which interferes with coeducation.  This is becoming especially noticeable at the University of Chicago, where prudishness interferes with classical, biological, sociological, and physiological discussion in the classroom.  There have been complaints by such women that a given professor has not left out embryological facts not in themselves in any way implying indelicacy.  I have even been informed that the opinion is often expressed