Sex and the Senses

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI As the earliest response to stimuli touch sensations are the first to prove pleasurable. The contact sense apprises the simplest organisms of the presence of food. All primitive life revolves around contact; and the sensation of touch remains the most vital arbiter of gratification in all the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI As the earliest response to stimuli touch sensations are the first to prove pleasurable. The contact sense apprises the simplest organisms of the presence of food. All primitive life revolves around contact; and the sensation of touch remains the most vital arbiter of gratification in all the chief concerns of individual existence. The human species is no exception. Here, too, the skin reflexes appear before birth. The child's earliest feeling attitude towards the mother is doubtless determined first by contact with the breast and by the pleasurable sensation evoked in its lips when placed in contact with the maternal nipple. All primal functions are endowed with pleasurable sensations. The special senses are not mere functions; they also have a distinct 'pleasure-value. The senses, therefore, have a double value for the individual. Functionally they subserve certain biotic needs. Psychically they generate at the same time the sensation or feeling of pleasure and gratification. Touch, of course, stands forth as the archaic bearer of all the sense of pleasure of which the lower species and all individuals of higher species during theirearlier periods of development are capable. For the newborn infant contact with the mother's nipple is the source of supreme gratification. The pleasure-value is distinct from the functional value of sensorial excitation. The individual may be most intensely aware of the pleasure-end and but dimly, if at all, of the functional value of his sensorial experiences. Sexual gratification, to point out the most conspicuous example in biology, is carried on among the lower organisms entirely on account of the pleasurable qualities of the touch excitations involved. Here Schopenhauer's contention that the individual is practically t...