Clinical Case Studies – Introduction

The so-called “sexual revolution” has been a matter of public attention for at least a decade now, and one would think that hardly a manifestation of human sexuality would have been left untouched by sociologists and psychologists. But strangely, although the sexual life of the teen-age girl has been studied from many angles, one of young womanhood’s most persistent desires has been largely ignored: the desire to have sex with dogs.

“Sex with dogs? Are there really teen-age girls who want that!”, even the well-informed layman is likely to ask. And the astonishment with which he would ask the question is a good indication of just how much ignorance surrounds the subject.

It is all the more surprising that bestiality has remained so unremarked when one considers just how strong a female desire it represents. I would be astonished if there were a practicing psychiatrist or psychologist in the country who had never had a woman patient who admitted to bestial fantasies. And many of my colleagues have, like myself, heard thoroughly convincing accounts of actual consummated sexual relations between their patients and the latters’ pets. For despite the fact that the conventional person for whom the established moral order is important often deludes himself into thinking that sexual practices which really offend him hardly ever take place, this does not alter the fact that woman-animal sex does indeed occur, and far, far more often than most people would suspect.

The subject of bestiality is so largely untreated that I have decided that it would be helpful to deal with a specific manifestation of it, so that by studying a part of the phenomenon – in real depth, the educated layman for whom this book is written may be helped to a larger understanding of the topic as a whole.