Note 7 — Chapter II · MODERN EMOTIONAL UNREST

Havelock Ellis, who coined the word autoerotism, defines it as follows (Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. I, page 161): “By ‘autoerotism’ I mean the phenomena of spontaneous sexual emotion generated in the absence of an external stimulus proceeding, directly or indirectly, from another person.” The present writer calls autoerotic those husbands who, in the love episode, secure their own erotic acme, in which their sexual, if not their erotic, tension is relaxed; but either do not know or do not care whether their wives reach a corresponding relaxation. The opposite of autoerotism is allerotism, where the husband places on the wife’s erotic relaxation a value at least equal to that which he places on his own.