Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 | Page 3

first
edition, appeared in the following year. Ten years have elapsed since
then and this new edition will be found to reflect the course of that long
interval. Not only is the volume greatly enlarged, but nearly every page
has been partly rewritten. This is mainly due to three causes: Much new
literature required to be taken into account; my own knowledge of the
historical and ethnographic aspects of the sexual impulse has increased;
many fresh illustrative cases of a valuable and instructive character
have accumulated in my hands. It is to these three sources of
improvement that the book owes its greatly revised and enlarged
condition, and not to the need for modifying any of its essential
conclusions. These, far from undergoing any change, have by the new
material been greatly strengthened.
It may be added that the General Preface to the whole work, which was
originally published in 1898 at the beginning of "Sexual Inversion,"
now finds its proper place at the outset of the present volume.
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
Carbis Bay,
Cornwall, Eng.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
The present volume contains three studies which seem to me to be
necessary prolegomena to that analysis of the sexual instinct which
must form the chief part of an investigation into the psychology of sex.
The first sketches the main outlines of a complex emotional state which
is of fundamental importance in sexual psychology; the second, by
bringing together evidence from widely different regions, suggests a
tentative explanation of facts that are still imperfectly known; the third
attempts to show that even in fields where we assume our knowledge to

be adequate a broader view of the phenomena teaches us to suspend
judgment and to adopt a more cautious attitude. So far as they go, these
studies are complete in themselves; their special use, as an introduction
to a more comprehensive analysis of sexual phenomena, is that they
bring before us, under varying aspects, a characteristic which, though
often ignored, is of the first importance in obtaining a clear
understanding of the facts: the tendency of the sexual impulse to appear
in a spontaneous and to some extent periodic manner, affecting women
differently from men. This is a tendency which, later, I hope to make
still more apparent, for it has practical and social, as well as
psychological, implications. Here--and more especially in the study of
those spontaneous solitary manifestations which I call auto-erotic--I
have attempted to clear the ground, and to indicate the main lines along
which the progress of our knowledge in these fields may best be
attained.
It may surprise many medical readers that in the third and longest study
I have said little, save incidentally, either of treatment or prevention.
The omission of such considerations at this stage is intentional. It may
safely be said that in no other field of human activity is so vast an
amount of strenuous didactic morality founded on so slender a basis of
facts. In most other departments of life we at least make a pretence of
learning before we presume to teach; in the field of sex we content
ourselves with the smallest and vaguest minimum of information, often
ostentatiously second-hand, usually unreliable. I wish to emphasize the
fact that before we can safely talk either of curing or preventing these
manifestations we must know a great deal more than we know at
present regarding their distribution, etiology, and symptomatology; and
we must exercise the same coolness and caution as--if our work is to be
fruitful--we require in any other field of serious study. We must
approach these facts as physicians, it is true, but also as psychologists,
primarily concerned to find out the workings of such manifestations in
fairly healthy and normal people. If we found a divorce-court judge
writing a treatise on marriage we should smile. But it is equally absurd
for the physician, so long as his knowledge is confined to disease, to
write regarding sex at large; valuable as the facts he brings forward
may be, he can never be in a position to generalize concerning them.

And to me, at all events, it seems that we have had more than enough
pictures of gross sexual perversity, whether furnished by the asylum or
the brothel. They are only really instructive when they are seen in their
proper perspective as the rare and ultimate extremes of a chain of
phenomena which we may more profitably study nearer home.
Yet, although we are, on every hand, surrounded by the normal
manifestations of sex, conscious or unconscious, these manifestations
are extremely difficult to observe, and, in those cases in which we are
best able to observe them, it frequently happens that we are unable to
make any use of our knowledge. Moreover, even when we have
obtained our data,