for her mother’s breasts, persisted to the age of puberty, though she learned to conceal it.  At the age of 13, when menstruation began, she noticed in dancing with her favorite girl friends that when her breasts came in contact with theirs she experienced a very agreeable sensation, with erection of the nipples; but it was not till the age of 16 that she observed that the sexual region took part in this excitement and became moist.  From this period she had erotic dreams about young girls.  She never experienced any attraction for young men, but eventually married; though having much esteem and affection for her husband, she never felt any but the slightest sexual enjoyment in his arms, and then only by evoking feminine images.  This case, in which the sensations of an infant at the breast formed the point of departure of a sexual perversion which lasted through life, is, so far as I am aware, unique.

FOOTNOTES: 

[17] Jonas Cohn (Allgemeine AEsthetik, 1901, p. 11) lays it down that psychology has nothing to do with good or bad taste.  “The distinction between good and bad taste has no meaning for psychology.  On this account, the fundamental conceptions of aesthetics cannot arise from psychology.”  It may be a question whether this view can be accepted quite absolutely.

[18] See Appendix A:  “The Origins of the Kiss.”

[19] See J.B.  Hellier, “On the Nipple Reflex,” British Medical Journal, November 7, 1896.

[20] Fere, L’Instinct Sexuel, second edition, p. 147.

IV.

The Bath—­Antagonism of Primitive Christianity to the Cult of the Skin—­Its Cult of Personal Filth—­The Reasons which Justified this Attitude—­The World-wide Tendency to Association between Extreme Cleanliness and Sexual Licentiousness—­The Immorality Associated with Public Baths in Europe down to Modern Times.

The hygiene of the skin, as well as its special cult, consists in bathing.  The bath, as is well known, attained under the Romans a degree of development which, in Europe at all events, it has never reached before or since, and the modern visitor to Rome carries away with him no more impressive memory than that of the Baths of Caracalla.  Since the coming of Christianity the cult of the skin, and even its hygiene, have never again attained the same general and unquestioned exaltation.  The Church killed the bath.  St. Jerome tells us with approval that when the holy Paula noted that any of her nuns were too careful in this matter she would gravely reprove them, saying that “the purity of the body and its garments means the impurity of the soul."[21] Or, as the modern monk of Mount Athos still declares:  “A man should live in dirt as in a coat of mail, so that his soul may sojourn more securely within.”