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Testimonies on Sexual Behavior, Adultery, and Divorce
Appendix A Masturbation And Insanity
In his scholarly study on “Masturbatory Insanity; The History of
an Idea,” (Journal of Mental Science 108:1, January, 1962), E. H. Hare
refers to a study of 500 patients admitted consecutively to the Iowa
state psychopathic hospital. He states that the authors of the study
(Malamud, W., and Palmer, G., “The Role Played by Masturbation in
the Causation of Mental Disturbances, Journal of Nervous and Mental
Disorders, 76:220, 1932) found that in twenty-two cases masturbation
was “apparently the most important cause of disorder.”
He then continues: “The authors concluded that it was the mental
conflict engendered by masturbation rather than the habit itself which
led to the illness, and they believed this conclusion to be supported by
the efficacy of psychotherapy directed towards readjusting the patient’s
ideas about masturbation. Yet the fact that fifteen of the twenty-two
patients suffered from depression must raise doubts about the validity
even of this temperate conclusion, for the depressed patient is not only
prone to blame himself for neglect of what he believes to be the rules
of health, but also tends to recover from his illness whether treated by
psychotherapy or not.”—P. 22
.
[269]
Thus Hare questions the conclusions of Malamud and Palmer, but
says, significantly, that their study is “one of the very few attempts
(indeed, as far as my reading goes, the only real attempt) at a scientific
study of the masturbatory hypothesis [the hypothesis that masturbation
can cause insanity].”
After acknowledging that “there is no way of disproving the mas-
turbatory hypothesis,” Hare offers his final conclusion: “All we can
say, from the evidence, is that the association between masturbation
and mental disorder is weak and inconstant and that therefore, if mas-
turbation is a causal factor, it is probably not a very important one”
(
The Ministry of Healing, 19
).
So, although this authority minimizes the possibility that mastur-
bation and insanity might be linked, he does not dismiss it altogether.