Suddenly one day, on sitting in close contact with a
young man at a _table d'hote_, he experienced a violent erection;
he afterward found that the same thing occurred with other young
men, and, though he had no psychic desire for men, he was
constrained to seek such contact, and a repugnance for women and
their sexuality arose. Five months later a complete paraplegic
impotence set in; and then both the homosexual tendency and the
aversion to women disappeared. (Fere, _L'Instinct Sexuel_, p.
184.) In such a case, under the influence of disease, excessive
stimulation seems to result in more or less complete sexual
anesthesia, just as temporarily we may be more or less blinded by
excess of light; and functional power reasserts itself under the
influence of a different and normally much weaker stimulus.
Leppmann, who has studied the homosexual manifestations of
previously normal old men toward boys ("Greisenalter und
Kriminalitaet," _Zeitschrift fuer Psychotherapie_, Bd. i, Heft 4,
1909), considers the chief factor to be a flaring up of the
sexual impulse in a perverted direction in an early stage of
morbid cerebral disturbance, not amounting to insanity and not
involving complete irresponsibility.
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