years ago to commit acts of exhibitionism, exposing himself to servants in the house and occasionally to women in the country.  This continued after the alcohol had been abandoned and lasted for several years, though the attention of the police was never attracted to the matter, and so far as possible he was quietly supervised by his friends.  Nine months after, the acts of exhibitionism ceased, apparently in a spontaneous manner, and there has so far been no relapse.

Exhibitionism is an act which, on the face of it, seems nonsensical and meaningless, and as such, as an inexplicable act of madness, it has frequently been treated both by writers on insanity and on sexual perversion.  “These acts are so lacking in common sense and intelligent reflection that no other reason than insanity can be offered for the patient,” Ball concluded.[55] Moll, also, who defines exhibitionism somewhat too narrowly as a condition in which “the charm of the exhibition lies for the subject in the display itself,” not sufficiently taking into consideration the imagined effect on the spectator, concludes that “the psychological basis of exhibitionism is at present by no means cleared up."[56]

We may probably best approach exhibitionism by regarding it as fundamentally a symbolic act based on a perversion of courtship.  The exhibitionist displays the organ of sex to a feminine witness, and in the shock of modest sexual shame by which she reacts to that spectacle, he finds a gratifying similitude of the normal emotions of coitus.[57] He feels that he has effected a psychic defloration.

Exhibitionism is thus analogous, and, indeed, related, to the impulse felt by many persons to perform indecorous acts or tell indecent stories before young and innocent persons of the opposite sex.  This is a kind of psychic exhibitionism, the gratification it causes lying exactly, as in physical exhibitionism, in the emotional confusion which it is felt to arouse.  The two kinds of exhibitionism may be combined in the same person:  Thus, in a case reported by Hoche (p. 97), the exhibitionist an intellectual and highly educated man, with a doctor’s degree, also found pleasure in sending indecent poems and pictures to women, whom, however, he made no attempt to seduce; he was content with the thought of the emotions he aroused or believed that he aroused.

It is possible that within this group should come the agent in the following incident which was lately observed by a lady, a friend of my own.  An elderly man in an overcoat was seen standing outside a large and well-known draper’s shop in the outskirts of London; when able to attract the attention of any of the shop-girls or of any girl in the street he would fling back his coat and reveal that he was wearing over his own clothes a woman’s chemise (or possibly bodice) and a woman’s drawers; there was no exposure.  The only intelligible explanation of this action would