In the two cases just brought forward we have an erotic symbolism of act founded on, and closely associated with, an erotic symbolism of object.  It may be instructive to bring forward another case in which no fetichistic feeling toward an object can be traced, but an erotic symbolism still clearly exists.  In this case pain, even when self-inflicted, has acquired a symbolic value as a stimulus to tumescence, without any element of masochism.  Such a case serves to indicate how the sexual attraction of pain is really a special case of the erotic symbolism with which we are here concerned.

A.W., aged 50, a writer and lecturer, physically and mentally energetic and enjoying good health.  He is, however, very emotional and of nervous temperament, but self-controlled.  Though physically well developed, the sexual organs are small.  He is married to an attractive woman, to whom he is much attached, and has two healthy children.

At 10 or 12 years of age he had a frequent desire to be whipped, his parents never having struck him, and on one occasion he asked a brother to go with him to the closet to get him to whip him on the posterior; but on arrival he was too shy to make the request.  He did not recognize the cause of these desires, knowing nothing of such things except from the misinformation of his school-fellows’ talk.  As far as he can remember, he was an entirely normal, healthy boy up to the age of about 15, when his attention was arrested by an advertisement of a quack medicine for the results of “youthful excesses.”

Being a city boy, he was unfamiliar with the coupling even of animals, had never had a conscious erection and did not know of frictional excitement.  Experiment, however, resulted in an orgasm, and, though believing that it was wicked or at least weak and degrading, he indulged in masturbation at intervals, usually about six times a month, and has continued even up to the present.

He had an abnormally small opening in the prepuce, making the uncovering of the glans almost impossible. (At the age of about 37, he himself slit the prepuce by three or four cuts of a scissors at intervals of about ten days.  This was followed by a marked decrease in desire, especially as he shortly afterwards learned the importance of local cleanliness.) While in college at about the age of 19 he began to have nocturnal emissions occasionally and once or twice a week when at stool.  Alarmed by these, he consulted a physician, who warned him of the danger, gave him bromide and prescribed cold bathing of the parts, with a hard, cool bed.  These stopped the emissions.

He never had connection with women until the age of about 25, and then only three times until his marriage at 30 years of age, being deterred partly by conscientious scruples, but more by shyness and convention, and deriving very little pleasure from these instances.  Even since marriage he has