We have to remember that in
Greece statues played a very prominent part in life, and also
that they were tinted, and thus more lifelike than with us.
Lucian, Athenaeus, AElian, and others refer to cases of men who
fell in love with statues. Tarnowsky (_Sexual Instinct_, English
edition, p. 85) mentions the case of a young man who was arrested
in St. Petersburg for paying moonlight visits to the statue of a
nymph on the terrace of a country house, and Krafft-Ebing quotes
from a French newspaper the case which occurred in Paris during
the spring of 1877 of a gardener who fell in love with a Venus in
one of the parks. (I. Bloch, _Beitraege zur AEtiologie der
Psychopathia Sexualis_, Teil II, pp. 297-305, brings together
various facts bearing on this group of manifestations.)
Necrophily, or a sexual attraction for corpses, is sometimes
regarded as related to pygmalionism. It is, however, a more
profoundly morbid manifestation, and may perhaps he regarded as a
kind of perverted sadism.
Founded on the sense of vision also we find a phenomenon,
bordering on the abnormal, which is by Moll termed mixoscopy.
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