Policy & principles : general aims / British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology.

  • British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology
Date:
[1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Policy & principles : general aims / British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    imputation that we advocate all those things which we say the law cannot properly touch. Indeed, I doubt whether we shall ever definitely advocate any cut and dried method for dealing with unsolved problems —except the method of fearless investigation, for the increase and dissemination of knowledge. We shall publish,—it is quite likely—side by side in the same pamphlet, opposite conclusions forined by opposing schools. Our aim will be much nearer satisfac- tion when we have thus put the thinking public in possession of two points of view —however opposite—than by merely leaving them ignorant of the grounds on which either is based. Another section of our enquiry is Disease: not necessarily venereal. It is fairly evident that many of the sexual phenomena we have to deal with will be found to have a connection in disease. But others, it is equally likely, may have a connection in growth, in re-adjustment of life to new ends; and may, in fact, deserve to be classed rather as growing-pains than as ailments. That being so, disease necessarily comes within the scope of our enquiry. If you find certain phenomena in obstinately healthy bodies,—in children born of good stock and of clean up-bringing—well, there is something on which we need medical pronouncement to guide us to clearer conclusions, and to class for us what should and what should not be treated as disease. In this connection you will see that one of our branches of enquiry is, Abberation of various kinds. The warp from the normal, or the cult of the unusual, which manifests through special and localised attractions in the amative relations, and which goes by the name of Fetishism, may, if properly studied be explanatory of much which now seems dark and forbidding. In agood many of its forms it may strike those who are not subject to it as rather ridiculous, or at any rate trivial. But in other forms or develop ments it is not trivial at all; and it is very closely related in its origin to things we are bound very seriously to consider and get to the root of. Certain forms of fetishism have indeed become so normal, and are so harmless, that we do not recognise them at all. The bulk of us may be subject to them without knowing it, and so, accepting the symptom merely as a social habit or as a racial characteristic, may be wholly unaware that we are innocuously connected to something which, of precisely similar origin but of different manifestation, arouses our wraths or our scorn.
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