Certain Things to be Noted concerning Sexual Psychology

The passages in this chapter are veiled. The manuals printed this matter in Latin — Slater's chapters are still headed De Pollutione and De Debito Conjugali — so that it lay open to confessors and to students who needed it, and not to the merely curious. Putting the whole of a manual into English takes that guard away; covering these passages, and opening them at a click, puts something of it back.

St. Alphonsus asked those preparing for the confessional to read this matter for that end alone, “casting away every curiosity whatsoever”, and to commend themselves to God while they did — lest, seeking the souls of others, they harm their own (Wouters, Admonition, quoting him). Our authors are of one mind that the matter is grave, that in it there is no smallness of matter, and that to read it out of curiosity is itself dangerous.

“How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done.”— Shakespeare, King John, IV, ii

Nothing is hidden: the covering is only here, on the page. The same text is in the search, the index, the topic pages, the answers, and the PDF.

I. Certain Notions concerning the Lower or Animal Psychic Lifen. 422
II. Which Psychic Elements Pertain to the Strictly Sexual or Venereal Actnn. 423–426
III. On Sexual Instinctnn. 427–431
- A. In Nonrational Animalsn. 427
- B. In Mannn. 428–431

Certain Things to be Noted concerning Sexual Psychology

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