Note 2 — Chapter I

Involuntary Sexual Orgasm.—This is a very cumbrous rendering of the German Pollution. In English we greatly need a general term, first, to denote all involuntary emissions of semen, whether nocturnal or diurnal; and, secondly, to denote involuntary sexual orgasm in the female as well as in the male. In the case of the female, the term "seminal emission" is inapplicable; but the term "pollution" may be applied in English (as it is in German) to such phenomena in either sex. By American writers the term "pollution" is now generally used (e.g., Allen, "Disorders of the Male Sexual Organs," Twentieth Century Practice, vol. vii. p. 612 et seq.). My first inclination, therefore, was to adopt the rendering "pollution" in this translation. But this word inevitably connotes the ideas of physical uncleanness and moral defilement, and its use would thus assist the survival of medieval ideas of the essentially corrupt nature of sexual passion—such ideas as are exemplified by the quaint survival among certain "occultists" of the medieval doctrine of incubi and succubi, by the belief that sexual dreams are induced by the "thought-forms" of other persons tormented by ungratified sexual desire! For this reason I have not attempted to acclimatise the word "pollution" in this country.—Translator's Note.