di Psichiatria.  The subject was a young lady of 19, of noble Italian birth, but born in Tunis.  On the maternal side there is a somewhat neurotic heredity, and she is herself subject to attacks of hystero-epileptoid character.  She was very carefully, but strictly, educated; she knows several languages, possesses marked intellectual aptitudes, and is greatly interested in social and political questions, in which she takes the socialistic and revolutionary side.  She has an attractive and sympathetic personality; in complexion she is dark, with dark eyes and very dark and abundant hair; the fine down on the upper lip and lower parts of the cheeks is also much developed; the jaw is large, the head acrocephalic, and the external genital organs of normal size, but rather asymmetric.  Ever since she was a child she has loved to work and dream in solitude.  Her dreams have always been of love, since menstruation began as early as the age of 10, and accompanied by strong sexual feelings, though at that age these feelings remained vague and indefinite; but in them the desire for pleasure was always accompanied by the desire for pain, the desire to bite and destroy something, and, as it were, to annihilate herself.  She experienced great relief after periods of “erotic rumination,” and if this rumination took place at night she would sometimes masturbate, the contact of the bedclothes, she said, giving her the illusion of a man.  In time this vague longing for the male gave place to more definite desires for a man who would love her, and, as she imagined, strike her.  Eventually she formed secret relationships with two or three lovers in succession, each of these relationships being, however, discovered by her family and leading to ineffectual attempts at suicide.  But the association of pain with love, which had developed spontaneously in her solitary dreams, continued in her actual relations with her lovers.  During coitus she would bite and squeeze her arms until the nails penetrated the flesh.  When her lover asked her why at the moment of coitus she would vigorously repel him, she replied:  “Because I want to be possessed by force, to be hurt, suffocated, to be thrown down in a struggle.”  At another time she said:  “I want a man with all his vitality, so that he can torture and kill my body.”  We seem to see here clearly the ancient biological character of animal courtship, the desire of the female to be violently subjugated by the male.  In this case it was united to sensitiveness to the sexual domination of an intellectual man, and the subject also sought to stimulate her lovers’ intellectual tastes. (Archivio di Psichiatria, vol. xx, fasc. 5-6, p. 528.)

This association between love and pain still persists even among the most normal civilized men and women possessing well-developed sexual impulses.  The masculine tendency to delight in domination, the feminine tendency to delight in submission, still maintain the ancient traditions when the male animal pursued