does not involve a real lack of sensation, but is simply due to an inhibition which keeps certain sensations in check, and excludes them from the consciousness.
If the anaesthetised arm of a hypnotised subject is pricked a certain number of times, and the medium is told to say how many times he has been pricked, he is able to do so, although otherwise he would not have perceived them. So also with sexual frigidity; it is an order given by the controlling force of the super-imposed asexual ideas; but this, like all other forms of anaesthesia, can be counteracted by a sufficiently strong "order."
The repulsion to sexuality in general shown by the hysterical woman corresponds in its nature with her insensibility to sexual matters in her own case. Such a repulsion, an intense disinclination for everything sexual, is really present in many women, and this may be urged as an exception to my generalisation as to the universality in woman of the match-making tendency. But women who are made ill by discovering two people in sexual intercourse are always hysterical. In this we have a special justification of the theory which holds match-making to be the true nature of woman, and which looks upon her own sexuality as merely a special case of it. A woman may be made hysterical not only by a sexual suggestion to herself which she outwardly resists whilst inwardly assenting to it, but may be just as much so by the sight of two people in sexual intercourse, for, though she thinks the matter has no value for her, her inborn assent to it forces itself through all outward and artificial barriers, and overcomes the superimposed and incorporated method of thought in which she usually lives. That is to say, she feels herself involved in the sexual union of others.
Something similar takes place in the hysterical "consciousness of guilt," which has already been spoken about. The absolute shrew never feels herself really in the wrong; the woman who is slightly hysterical only feels so in the presence of men; the woman who is thoroughly hysterical feels it in the presence of the particular man who dominates
