On Some of the Varieties of Morbid Impulse and Perverted Instinct

Abstract

The various forms under which morbid impulses and perverted instincts present themselves have generally been classed by authors under “Moral Insanity” † and “Emotional Insanity,” † or each has been titled a mania or monomania. Their occurrence is found to be regulated by the degree of civilisation, mode of life–whether in town or country–and the prevailing tendencies of the age, which indelibly stamps them with its characteristic features. The classification adopted in the following pages is that of Professor Laycock, § which leads us first to examine those connected with the nourishment of the being.

From Libidines nefandæ to sexual perversions

“…The English literature by the mid-1860s included a similar nosological rubrication of ‘perversion’, next to ‘exaltation’, of the sex instinct (e.g. McIntosh, 1866 : 525). The schema ‘inordinate exaltation/perversion/abolition’ was preliminarily advanced, incidentally, in a book review ( Anon., 1852 ).…”

Anaesthetic Bodies and the Absence of Feeling: Pain and Self-Mutilation in Later Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry

“…Amongst the insane many marked cases are observed. 22 If 'many' (rather than all) such acts were symptoms of insanity, this could suggest that some might not be. This issue increasingly became a topic of discussion in the last decades of the century as self-inflicted injury became commonly associated with so-called 'nervous disorders', in particular the 'cutaneous anaesthesia' commonly regarded as a major symptom of hysteria.…”