it is morbid when a man allows himself to be insulted, bound and flogged, but it is fairly normal when his passionate admiration is roused by an imperious woman, who passes him by like a queen without even noticing his abject adoration; when he longs to kneel down before her and kiss her feet, which in reward would spurn him.  Quite normal, too, is the boyish happiness in serving an admired and adored woman (Kraft-Ebbing calls this pageism) described so beautifully in Dostoievsky’s novel, A Young Hero, and fairly common among troubadours and minnesingers. (I need only mention Ulrich von Lichtenstein.) There are numerous degrees of this feeling—­we frequently come across it in the novels of Dostoievsky, Jacobsen, Strindberg, D’Annunzio, and others—­but the essence of it is always contained in the fact that the man, although yearning to worship the beloved woman, cannot maintain himself in the sphere of spiritual love, and aspires to direct physical contact.  His attitude, which closely imitates purely spiritual love, cannot be other than sexual.  The blending of love and sexuality together with the incapacity of effecting a real synthesis, the confusion of value and pleasure is most clearly shown in the masochist—­far more clearly than in the case of the (rare) seeker of love.  The outward modes preferred by the individual are a matter of indifference; for the most part they are symbolical acts, indicating the lover’s inferiority and the loftiness and power of his mistress.  What is really of importance is the spiritual attitude which induces him to commit these strange acts, and in these we find the characteristic attitude of the woman-worshipper:  that of the slave before his queen.  The slave of love is a sensualist incapable of approaching woman in a normally manly, instinctive and natural way, but requiring the pose of the spiritual worshipper.  One might be tempted to believe that he harboured the secret wish to atone for his incapacity of feeling a pure love by being degraded and ill-treated.  Thus from a human point of view the slave of love is a higher type than the seeker of love; all his transgressions, the fault of his morbid disposition, come home to him; he takes the blame of his sin upon his own shoulders, while the seeker of love revenges himself on his victims for his own shortcomings.  The seeker of love is by nature polygamous, while the slave of love is, as a rule, monogamous (and consequently has little success with the opposite sex).  Both aspire to a union of sensual and spiritual eroticism, but in both cases the union is a failure.  All the repulsive and terrible manifestations of these perversions which have been recorded, can easily be shown to fit my theory.  In psychological research it is merely a question of selecting the great types from the mass of phenomena and determining them correctly.