Very few ever fully appreciate the powerful influence which sexuality exercises over feeling, thought, and conduct, both in the individual and in society. It is remarkable that the sexual life has received but a very subordinate consideration on the part of philosophers.
What Schopenhauer and, after him, the Philosopher of the Unconscious, E. The poets may be better psychologists than the psychologists and philosophers; but they are men of feeling rather than of understanding, and at least one-sided in their consideration of the subject.
They cannot see the deep shadow behind the light and sunny warmth of that from which they draw their inspiration. The poetry of all times and nations would furnish inexhaustible material for a monograph on the psychology of love; but the great problem can be solved only with the help of iv Science, and especially with the aid of Medicine, which studies the psychological subject at its anatomical and physiological source, and views it from all sides.
It is not the intention of the author to lay the foundation of a psychology of the sexual life, though without doubt psychopathology would furnish many important sources of knowledge to psychology.
The purpose of this treatise is a description of the pathological manifestations of the sexual life and an attempt to refer them to their underlying conditions. The task is a difficult one, and, in spite of years of experience as alienist and medical jurist, I am well aware that what I can offer must be incomplete. The importance of the subject for the welfare of society, especially forensically, demands, however, that it should be examined scientifically.
