employed mainly by those who are unconsciously dominated by a
superstitious repugnance to sex.

I now turn to a very much more serious and elaborate attempt to define the
constitution of the sexual impulse, that of Moll. He finds that it is made
up of two separate components, each of which may be looked upon as an
uncontrollable impulse.[19] One of these is that by which the tension of
the sexual organs is spasmodically relieved; this he calls the _impulse of
detumescence_,[20] and he regards it as primary, resembling the impulse to
empty a full bladder. The other impulse is the "instinct to approach,
touch, and kiss another person, usually of the opposite sex"; this he
terms the _impulse of contrectation_, and he includes under this head not
only the tendency to general physical contact, but also the psychic
inclination to become generally interested in a person of the opposite
sex. Each of these primary impulses Moll regards as forming a constituent
of the sexual instinct in both men and women. It seems to me undoubtedly
true that these two impulses do correspond to the essential phenomena. The
awkward and unsatisfactory part of Moll's analysis is the relation of the
one to the other. It is true that he traces both impulses back to the
sexual glands, that of detumescence directly, that of contrectation
indirectly; but evidently he does not regard them as intimately related to
each other; he insists on the fact that they may exist apart from each
other, that they do not appear synchronously in youth: the contrectation
impulse he regards as secondary; it is, he states, an indirect result of
the sexual glands, "only to be understood by the developmental history of
these glands and the object which they subserve"; that is to say, that it
is connected with the rise of the sexual method of reproduction and the
desirability of the mingling of the two sexes in procreation, while the
impulse of detumescence arose before the sexual method of reproduction had
appeared; thus the contrectation impulse was propagated by natural