Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 | Page 5

fluid for even as
long as nine months may still be successfully transplanted on to the
body. (British Medical Journal, July 19, 1902.)
Everything indicates, remark Stanley Hall and Donaldson ("Motor
Sensations in the Skin," Mind, 1885), that the skin is "not only the
primeval and most reliable source of our knowledge of the external
world or the archæological field of psychology," but a field in which
work may shed light on some of the most fundamental problems of
psychic action. Groos (Spiele der Menschen, pp. 8-16) also deals with
the primitive character of touch sensations.
Touch sensations are without doubt the first of all the sensory
impressions to prove pleasurable. We should, indeed, expect this from

the fact that the skin reflexes have already appeared before birth, while
a pleasurable sensitiveness of the lips is doubtless a factor in the child's
response to the contact of the maternal nipple. Very early memories of
sensory pleasure seem to be frequently, perhaps most frequently, tactile
in character, though this fact is often disguised in recollection, owing to
tactile impression being vague and diffused; there is thus in Elizabeth
Potwin's "Study of Early Memories" (Psychological Review, November,
1901) no separate group of tactile memories, and the more elaborate
investigation by Colegrove ("Individual Memories," American Journal
of Psychology, January, 1899) yields no decisive results under this head.
See, however, Stanley Hall's valuable study, "Some Aspects of the
Early Sense of Self," American Journal of Psychology, April, 1898.
Külpe has a discussion of the psychology of cutaneous sensations
(Outlines of Psychology [English translation], pp. 87 et seq.)
Harriet Martineau, at the beginning of her Autobiography, referring to
the vivid character of tactile sensations in early childhood, remarks,
concerning an early memory of touching a velvet button, that "the
rapture of the sensation was really monstrous." And a lady tells me that
one of her earliest memories at the age of 3 is of the exquisite sensation
of the casual contact of a cool stone with the vulva in the act of
urinating. Such sensations, of course, cannot be termed specifically
sexual, though they help to furnish the tactile basis on which the
specifically sexual sensations develop.
The elementary sensitiveness of the skin is shown by the fact that
moderate excitation suffices to raise the temperature, while Heidenhain
and others have shown that in animals cutaneous stimuli modify the
sensibility of the brain cortex, slight stimulus increasing excitability
and strong stimulus diminishing it. Féré has shown that the slight
stimulus to the skin furnished by placing a piece of metal on the arm or
elsewhere suffices to increase the output of work with the ergograph.
(Féré, _Comptes Rendus Société de Biologie_, July 12, 1902; id.,
Pathologic des Emotions, pp. 40 et seq.)
Féré found that the application of a mustard plaster to the skin, or an
icebag, or a hot-water bottle, or even a light touch with a painter's brush,

all exerted a powerful effect in increasing muscular work with the
ergograph. "The tonic effect of cutaneous excitation," he remarks,
"throws light on the psychology of the caress. It is always the most
sensitive parts of the body which seek to give or to receive caresses.
Many animals rub or lick each other. The mucous surfaces share in this
irritability of the skin. The kiss is not only an expression of feeling; it is
a means of provoking it. Cataglottism is by no means confined to
pigeons. The tonic value of cutaneous stimulation is indeed a
commonly accepted idea. Wrestlers rub their hands or limbs, and the
hand-shake also is not without its physiological basis.
"Cutaneous excitations may cause painful sensations to cease. Many
massage practices which favor work act chiefly as sensorial stimulants;
on this account many nervous persons cannot abandon them, and the
Greeks and Romans found in massage not only health, but pleasure.
Lauder Brunton regards many common manoeuvres, like scratching the
head and pulling the mustache, as methods of dilating the bloodvessels
of the brain by stimulating the facial nerve. The motor reactions of
cutaneous excitations favor this hypothesis." (Féré, Travail et Plaisir,
Chapter XV, "Influence des Excitations du Toucher sur le Travail.")
The main characteristics of the primitive sense of touch are its wide
diffusion over the whole body and the massive vagueness and
imprecision of the messages it sends to the brain. This is the reason,
why it is, of all the senses, the least intellectual and the least æsthetic; it
is also the reason why it is, of all the senses, the most-profoundly
emotional. "Touch," wrote Bain in his Emotions and Will, "is both the
alpha and the omega of affection," and he insisted on the special
significance in this connection of "tenderness"--a characteristic
emotional quality of affection which is directly founded on sensations
of touch. If tenderness is the