Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 | Page 6

alpha of affection, even between the sexes,
its omega is to be found in the sexual embrace, which may be said to be
a method of obtaining, through a specialized organization of the skin,
the most exquisite and intense sensations of touch.
"We believe nothing is so exciting to the instinct or mere passions as
the presence of the hand or those tactile caresses which mark

affection," states the anonymous author of an article on "Woman in her
Psychological Relations," in the Journal of Psychological Medicine,
1851. "They are the most general stimuli in lower animals. The first
recourse in difficulty or danger, and the primary solace in anguish, for
woman is the bosom of her husband or her lover. She seeks solace and
protection and repose on that part of the body where she herself places
the objects of her own affection. Woman appears to have the same
instinctive impulse in this respect all over the world."
It is because the sexual orgasm is founded on a special adaptation and
intensification of touch sensations that the sense of touch generally is to
be regarded as occupying the very first place in reference to the sexual
emotions. Féré, Mantegazza, Penta, and most other writers on this
question are here agreed. Touch sensations constitute a vast gamut for
the expression of affection, with at one end the note of minimum
personal affection in the brief and limited touch involved by the
conventional hand-shake and the conventional kiss, and at the other end
the final and intimate contact in which passion finds the supreme
satisfaction of its most profound desire. The intermediate region has its
great significance for us because it offers a field in which affection has
its full scope, but in which every road may possibly lead to the goal of
sexual love. It is the intimacy of touch contacts, their inevitable
approach to the threshold of sexual emotion, which leads to a jealous
and instinctive parsimony in the contact of skin and skin and to the
tendency with the increased sensitiveness of the nervous system
involved by civilization to restrain even the conventional touch
manifestation of ordinary affection and esteem. In China fathers leave
off kissing their daughters while they are still young children. In
England the kiss as an ordinary greeting between men and women--a
custom inherited from classic and early Christian antiquity--still
persisted to the beginning of the eighteenth century. In France the same
custom existed in the seventeenth century, but in the middle of that
century was beginning to be regarded as dangerous,[2] while at the
present time the conventional kiss on the cheek is strictly differentiated
from the kiss on the mouth, which is reserved for lovers. Touch
contacts between person and person, other than those limited and
defined by custom, tend to become either unpleasant--as an undesired

intrusion into an intimate sphere--or else, when occurring between man
and woman at some peculiar moment, they may make a powerful
reverberation in the emotional and more specifically sexual sphere. One
man falls in love with his future wife because he has to carry her
upstairs with a sprained ankle. Another dates his love-story from a
romp in which his cheek accidentally came in contact with that of his
future wife. A woman will sometimes instinctively strive to attract the
attention of the man who appeals to her by a peculiar and prolonged
pressure of the hand--the only touch contact permitted to her. Dante, as
Penta has remarked, refers to "sight or touch" as the two channels
through which a woman's love is revived (Purgatorio, VIII, 76). Even
the hand-shake of a sympathetic man is enough in some chaste and
sensitive women to produce sexual excitement or sometimes even the
orgasm. The cases in which love arises from the influence of stimuli
coming through the sense of touch are no doubt frequent, and they
would be still more frequent if it were not that the very proximity of
this sense to the sexual sphere causes it to be guarded with a care which
in the case of the other senses it is impossible to exercise. This intimacy
of touch and the reaction against its sexual approximations leads to
what James has called "the antisexual instinct, the instinct of personal
isolation, the actual repulsiveness to us of the idea of intimate contact
with most of the persons we meet, especially those of our own sex." He
refers in this connection to the unpleasantness of the sensation felt on
occupying a seat still warm from the body of another person.[3] The
Catholic Church has always recognized the risks of vuluptuous emotion
involved in tactile contacts, and the facility with which even the most
innocent contacts may take on a libidinous character.[4]
The following observations were written by a lady (aged 30)