The Psychology of Sex (Vol. 1-6) - Havelock Ellis

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at puberty, Venturi considers, "is a moment in the course of the development of the function of that organ which is the necessary instrument of sexuality." It finds its motive in the satisfaction of an organic need having much analogy with that which arises from the tickling of a very sensitive cutaneous surface. In this masturbation of early adolescence lies, according to Venturi, the germ of what will later be love: a pleasure of the body and of the spirit, following the relief of a satisfied need. "As the youth develops, onanism becomes a sexual act comparable to coitus as a dream is comparable to reality, imagery forming in correspondence with the desires. In its fully developed form in adolescence," Venturi continues, "masturbation has an almost hallucinatory character; onanism at this period psychically approximates to the true sexual act, and passes insensibly into it. If, however, continued on into adult age, it becomes morbid, passing into erotic fetichism; what in the inexperienced youth is the natural auxiliary and stimulus to imagination, in the degenerate onanist of adult age is a sign of arrested development. Thus, onanism," the author concludes, "is not always a vice such as is fiercely combated by educators and moralists. It is the natural transition by which we reach the warm and generous love of youth, and, in natural succession to this, the tranquil, positive, matrimonial love of the mature man." (Silvio Venturi, Le Degenerazioni Psico-sessuale, 1892, pp. 6–9.)

      It may be questioned whether this view is acceptable even for the warm climate of the south of Europe, where the impulses of sexuality are undoubtedly precocious. It is certainly not in harmony with general experience and opinion in the north; this is well expressed in the following passage by Edward Carpenter (International Journal of Ethics, July, 1899): "After all, purity (in the sense of continence) is of the first importance to boyhood. To prolong the period of continence in a boy's life is to prolong the period of growth. This is a simple physiological law, and a very obvious one; and, whatever other things may be said in favor of purity, it remains, perhaps, the most weighty. To introduce sensual and sexual habits—and one of the worst of them is self-abuse—at an early age, is to arrest growth, both physical and mental. And what is even more, it means to arrest the capacity for affection. All experience shows that the early outlet toward sex cheapens and weakens affectional capacity."

      The sexual impulse is not, as some have imagined, the sole root of the most massive human emotions, the most brilliant human aptitudes—of sympathy, of art, of religion. In the complex human organism, where all the parts are so many-fibred and so closely interwoven, no great manifestation can be reduced to one single source. But it largely enters into and molds all of these emotions and aptitudes, and that by virtue of its two most peculiar characteristics: it is, in the first place, the deepest and most volcanic of human impulses, and, in the second place—unlike the only other human impulse with which it can be compared, the nutritive impulse—it can, to a large extent, be transmuted into a new force capable of the strangest and most various uses. So that in the presence of all these manifestations we may assert that in a real sense, though subtly mingled with very diverse elements, auto-erotism everywhere plays its part. In the phenomena of auto-erotism, when we take a broad view of those phenomena, we are concerned, not with a form of insanity, not necessarily with a form of depravity, but with the inevitable by-products of that mighty process on which the animal creation rests.