Perversions represent profound enervation and are seen in the sensual who have so exhausted their power that the ordinary or normal things of life have ceased to hold anything for them. In sex they represent impotency.

When, through over indulgence, a man has become so impotent that hours are spent in intercourse in achieving orgasm, or if he cannot achieve orgasm in normal coition at all, he seeks for new and more novel forms of gratification. As his sensual indulgence continues more and more irritations are required to give gratification.

One may become so jaded that pain in a slight degree is exciting. Jennings tells of pulling a man's tooth and the man experienced pleasure and not pain from the operation. He explained that the nerves were so near dead that the operation was able to excite them only enough to produce a pleasurable sensation. In the sexual sphere pain is often sought by women and by roues, as a means of increasing their pleasures. Masochists require pain to enable them to achieve orgasm. Similar to this is sadism that can achieve orgasm only by inflicting pain upon another.

The masturbator whose nervous system is so low that he can no longer achieve orgasm by any amount of masturbatory effort, frequently resorts to burning or cutting his penis to secure the desired sensation. All such perversions are due to sexual enervation. But the tyrant desire-- established habit--calls loudly for gratification.

We get used to things by repetition and this both removes the pain from hurt and the novelty from joy. This causes us to search for new and more novel forms of excitement and gratification. Bitter foods give pleasure to the jaded appetite because the disagreeable element is just enough to excite pleasurable sensations in the palsied gastro-intestinal tract. The more jaded one is, that is, the more used to excitement he is, the greater the excitement needed to produce the desired feelings and sensations.

The gourmand who can enjoy his food only when it is highly seasoned; the addict who feels well only when under the influence of his favorite drug--these are all profoundly enervated. In the cases of sexual and gustatory perversions, there is sexual and gustatory enervation added to general enervation.

The pervert--one in whom an established habit (neurosis, even psychosis)--demands repeatedly to experience the desired thrill or sense pleasure, is not only profoundly enervated, but each repetition of his perverted practice further enervates; hence the progressive downward tendency of perversion; hence the ever growing demand for newer, stronger, more frequent excitement.

Bad habits are only gradually assumed and the natural consequences of these require time to reach maturity.