The Child’s Perspective of Pedophilia > The Development of the Sexual Instinct by Havelock Ellis > Volume III, Appendix B, History XVI

The Development of the Sexual Instinct
by Havelock Ellis

Case histories from the classic text, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volumes II through V
E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


Volume III, Appendix B, History XVI
Second Edition (1913), Revised and Enlarged, 1927
Full text from Project Gutenberg
Go to the listing of case histories.


     This history is given in the subject's own words: A. N., 34 years of age, a university graduate, devoted to learning and interested in philosophy and theology. He is happily married and the father of an only daughter. Since puberty he has enjoyed excellent health.

     "Looking back he finds the beginnings of sexual feeling obscure. This feeling is by no means identical in its progress with the knowledge of the phenomena of sex generally. The latter he acquired thus: His mother told him at a very early age the outlines of the phenomena of birth and explained to him (perhaps at that time unnecessarily) that the genital organs of little girls were different from his own. This piece of knowledge led to his asking, when 9 years old, a little girl cousin who came to live with the family (he was an only child) and who shared his bed to let him see her genitalia. This she readily did and also invited him to coitus, which she described as a 'nice game.' He complied, but without, of course, any feeling of pleasure or any understanding of the nature of what he was doing. Shortly after this he went to a day school, where, amid the extraordinarily coarse conversation of the boys, he was initiated into all the more obvious phenomena of sex. But still it was only a matter of intellectual curiosity. As such it had a strange fascination for him, and to this day he remembers many of the obscene words and phrases, as, for example, a set of indecent verses beginning 'William, the milkman, sat under a tree,' describing coitus, though some of the details were yet misunderstood by him. That up to his tenth or eleventh year no real sexual desire was awakened is plain from the fact that there was no desire for any repetition of attempts at coitus with his cousin, though he did indeed, again out of curiosity, finger her genitals sometimes, a thing which she, grown evidently more fastidious, reported to his mother, who gravely reprimanded him, telling him that it was the 'beginning of all evil.'

     "Desire was awakened gradually and, as I have said, obscurely. Not only at school, but among his own cousins, especially two girls (other than the one above mentioned) and a boy, the conversation was lascivious in the extreme, though words never proceeded to deeds as between the boys and the girls. He was soon, however, about his fifteenth year, so far as he can remember, initiated into the practice of masturbation, first, sleeping with his boy cousin, the two used to play at 'husband and wife,' and then, more directly, a neighbor, a heavy, sensual type of boy, took him aside one day and drawing out his own penis asked him 'if he knew how to make some buttermilk.' Out of curiosity at first, and to obtain the new and voluptuous sensation afterward, he began assiduously to practise this vice, which, as he afterward found out, was very common, if not universal about him. That it was morally reprehensible he had not at that time the ghost of a notion; he considered that it belonged to the category of the 'dirty' only. His father quite neglected this development, believing, I suppose, in the superstition of the 'innocence of childhood.'

     "This practice of masturbation went on assiduously to his sixteenth year, when its true nature and danger were revealed to him by a good clergyman who prepared him for confirmation. He had at this time gone far, in both solitary vice and vice 'à deux,' with his male cousin, with whom he practised even 'fellatio' and 'intromissio in anum.' But now he began to struggle against it and made some headway, but never entirely shook it off before his marriage at 26, so deeply rooted was the hold it had on him. Especially at the time between sleeping and waking, or while lying sleepless at night—when the monks prayed 'ne polluantur corpora'—did its attacks come insidiously upon him. He would struggle for weeks and then would come a relapse. On one occasion he slept with a young uncle who amused himself, thinking he was asleep, by playing with his penis until he had an emission. A. N. hailed the occasion with keen joy—he caustically argued that he experienced the pleasure without being culpable in its production! Then on 'coming to himself' he would agonize over his vice, remembering, for example, that, while he had rejoiced in what had been done, the very cousin who some time before used to share his sin was genuinely annoyed at the same uncle's attentions when it was he who suffered them.

     "Looking back over the whole period of his youth and adolescence, he can trace the psychological effect of what was going on secretly, in his relations to girls and women. In a word, these relations were sentimental only. He often imagined himself in love; but it was imagination only. He was in love with a wraith, not a girl of flesh and blood. He hesitated to regard in any sexual way any girl of whom he had a high opinion; sexual desire and 'love' seemed for him to inhabit different worlds and that it would be a pollution to bring them together. In hours of relaxation from the very hard intellectual work which he was at this time engaged on at school and at the university, he was quite content with the society of quite young girls or even children when most of his friends would have sought out females of their own age. Nothing could have been farther from his desires or intention than any lascivious or, indeed, unseemly act toward any female in whose company he might be: no mother need have hesitated to trust her daughter in his company. I firmly believe that the discipline of the same bed which Gibbon (Decline and Fall, ed. Bury, vol. ii, p. 37) makes so merry over could have been endured by him without difficulty. His outward conduct was in all these respects most seemly and decorous, yet night after night he could masturbate, his imagination glowing with visions of female nakedness.

     "Curiously the one and only actual female for whom he felt any desire at the earlier period (aged 14 to 16) began to be the cousin who lived in the house. On one occasion he touched her breasts, on another her naked thighs—and that was all! As she grew to puberty, she would have allowed far more liberties, but he contented himself with a sly glance now and again, when he could procure it, at her swelling bosom. The fear of putting her with child was ample to keep him away from her bed. Later on even so much as the foregoing occurred no more, and, as I have said, his outward life became absolutely decorous.

     "Consequently he was in no danger of having dealings with prostitutes. The preliminaries, the conversation of such women, especially their drinking habits, would have been disgusting and repugnant to him in the extreme. He would have shunned the possibility of acquiring venereal disease like the plague. But he was never free from solitary vice; he secretly envied those who had occasions for coitus in what I may call a seemly and cleanly manner, friends in the country with farm girls, etc., of whom he had heard. He indulged also in lascivious reading, the obscene when he could procure it, rather than the merely suggestive, which has never been to his taste. He was familiar with quite a large number of Latin and Greek indecent passages, knew the broader farces of the Canterbury Tales and of the Decameron, and, later, the 'contes' of La Fontaine and the Facetiæ of Poggio. As Ste.-Beuve says of Gibbon, I think, he acquired an 'erudite and cold' sort of obscenity in this way.

     "All this, of course, is only one half, and by no means always the dominant half, of his nature. He was often repentant for these delinquencies, and he was sincerely religious. He was also fond of serious learning and contrived to take a first-class university degree. Yet, ever and anon, the deeply sensual side of his nature made itself felt. Scotched for a time it could be, but killed never.

     "Yet, I do not think it could be said that he had the sexual instinct in any really high degree. It was more like a small fly that makes a large buzz than any considerable factor in his constitution. He had a companion about this time of whom such a remark is even more true. This man's mind was replete with all manner of risky stories, all sorts of sexual details. He would take long walks with girls of loose character, talk with prostitutes at home and abroad, and yet, I believe, he never proceeded to coitus.

     "Such then, was the subject of this notice up to the time of his marriage. Two men, one might say, in one skin. One learned, one merely obscene; one a pattern of decorousness, the other a self-polluter.

     "On the sexual side he was as one knowing everything there is to know—yet knowing nothing. Like the boy-hero in Wedekind's Frühling's Erwachen, he had been long in Egypt, yet he had never seen the pyramids. He began to distress himself with questions as to whether he was yet capable; whether his recurring vice had not permanently injured him; whether he had made himself unfit for marriage. So shy and reserved was he about his secret that he could never have brought himself to mention it to a medical man. 'What! he! the good, the religious! the wholly moral and decorous!' (such was, indeed, the reputation he had among his friends); 'he, the victim of a vice so black!' No, no! 'Secretum meum mihi,' he cried.

     "Fortune, however, was kind to him. He was at an early age free from financial worries, which had almost crushed him earlier in his career, and he met in course of time the family from which he selected his excellent wife.

     "The society in which he lived was of all English classes, I should suppose, the most reticent in matters of sex—the respectable, lower middle class; shopkeepers and the like, with a tradition of homely religion and virtue. The classes a little higher in the scale (to which, by the way, his mother had belonged) could far better sympathize with one in his position. Well, the family of his future wife was of a higher class and, what is far more, of foreign origin, for whom a large number of our English 'convenances' do not exist. To them sex was frankly recognized as a factor in life, and the mother of this household, as he grew more intimate, broached subjects which he had never, in such a manner, discussed before. It is unnecessary to give here any general history of his relationships with this household, as they have nothing to do with the matter in hand. After some time he became engaged to the youngest daughter, two years his senior, a woman of remarkable beauty and splendid development, one who attracted him as none other had done, both on account of her intellectual and social qualities and her physical beauty (he had hitherto despaired of finding the two combined in one person), for she is certainly the most beautiful woman with whom he has ever been acquainted.

     "He now began to make the practical acquaintance of a woman—and one who, in impulses, temper, manner, and habit of thought, differed toto cælo from the girls he had known in his old home. Her sexual nature was ripe and developed, and it is lucky that the engagement was of short duration, or the strain and anticipation of that time might have been injurious to the health of both. As usual, in his outward relations toward women, so toward his fiancée, he was prepared for chaste caresses only. This, however, did not suffice for her hot and passionate nature. They went as far as possible short of actual coitus.

     "After a few months, however, the marriage took place, and, at first, this brought him bitter disappointment and seemed to confirm his worst fears. He found himself quite unable to have pleasure or satisfactory coitus; quite incapable, with any erection that he could command, of introducing his well-developed penis into his wife's extremely narrow and contracted vagina. About a fortnight after the marriage, however, on his return from their short wedding tour, he felt much stronger and copulated with her, especially in the early mornings, so satisfactorily that she soon found herself with child. Coitus now began to be much more pleasurable for him, but to his wife still attended with pain.

     "After nine months of married life, the child, the only offspring of the marriage, a healthy girl, was born. The stress of this time, the upsetting of his wife's health, her nervous breakdown and consequently uncertain temper, seemed for a period of nearly two years effectually to repress any sexual desire in the husband, and this period is perhaps the chastest of his life. Desire seemed to be the one thing absent. The revulsion of feeling in his wife was remarkable. The erstwhile amorous fiancée, who could hardly wait until marriage to test her lover, became now the wife and mother who hardly wished to be touched by her husband.

     "Her health, however, gradually improved and a more normal state of affairs was brought about, which has continued to the present day, broken only by periods of abstention, chiefly caused by the attacks of anemia and menstrual irregularities from which his wife suffers from time to time. Ordinarily, he enjoys coitus once or twice in the month, hardly oftener, taking one month with another. At one time he exemplified in his own person the saying omne animal post coitum triste, but now happily this depression of spirits is rarely felt. Sometimes he has felt a depression of spirits, a general discontentedness, before experiencing a strong erection; in these cases coitus has cleared his spirits. He would naturally look upon coitus as an evacuation, although he recognizes the imperfectness of that view. For one thing he is constantly sorry, viz., that the act gives no pleasure to his wife, and that he has never been able to induce a crisis with her by normal means. In this state of affairs, knowing that 'après coup' she was still unsatisfied, he slipped into the practice of rubbing the clitoris with his fingers until the emission takes place. To do this, they assume the position 'ille sub, illa super.' From his own limited marital experience, he has never been able to understand the stories of women who masturbate several times a day, as his wife would be physically incapable (so he believes) of anything of the kind, and only easily reaches the crisis in any circumstances during the first few days after the menstrual flow has ceased. In fine, while agreeing theoretically with Sir Richard Burton and others that the eastern style of coitus (directed with a view to the pleasure of your partner) is the right one, it is one of his standing regrets that he is unable to practise it. In the place of the twenty minutes required by the women of India (according to Burton) he is happy if he can give two or three at the most, much as he would wish to prolong a pleasure as keen to himself as he could desire it to be to his dear and excellent spouse."