Psychic Impotence*: Case Studies

There is an uncharted region of medicine vaguely termed Sexual Neuroses and into which are indiscriminately included a large variety of conditions that are often but remotely related. There are grouped here problems of masturbation and pollution, homosexuality and hermaphroditism, enuresis and incontinence, impotence and frigidity, satyriasis and nymphomania, sadism and masochism, coitus interruptus, spermatorrhea, etc. At a glance it may be seen that the feature common to all of them is that they have something to do with disturbances in our sex life and that they manifest themselves through the sexual apparatus. The designation is not quite correct for both clinical experience as well as scientific formulation have long taught us that the mere manifestation of a number of symptoms through a particular organ need not imply a genetic relationship. Hence, the above mentioned conditions need not at all have a sexual significance merely because they use the sexual apparatus for their manifestations, while, on the other hand, we know that functional disturbances in other systems as gastrointestinal, cardiac, vasomotor, etc., are often traced to a sexual etiology. Thus in one case that came under observation the patient showed a large goiter along with a number of neurotic phenomena as fears, anxieties, etc. A study of his life revealed among other things, a disturbance of his sex life, impotence and syphilophobia upon which his anxieties and goiter appear to have been conditioned. As he was cured of his fears, the goiter disappeared accordingly. In another