Besides these general analogies there is a form of mental disease which
is genuine love-sickness, the outcome of brain disease, and which often
seems, for all the world, like a deliberate caricature of Coquetry.
“It often happens,” says Dr. Hammond, “that the subjects of emotional
monomania of the variety under consideration do not restrict their love
to any one person. They adore the whole male sex, and will make advances
to any man with whom they are brought into even the slightest
association. If confined in an asylum they simper and clasp their hands,
and roll their eyes to the attendants, especially the physicians, and
even the male patients are not below their affections. There is very
little constancy in their love. They change from one man to another with
the utmost facility and upon the slightest pretext. ‘I am very much in
love with Dr. ——,’ said a woman to me in an asylum that I was visiting,
‘but he was late yesterday in coming to the ward, and now I love you.
You will come often to see me, won’t you?’ While she was speaking the
superintendent entered the ward. ‘Oh, here comes my first and only
love!’ she exclaimed. ’Why have you stayed away so long from your
Eliza?‘”
Professor von Krafft-Ebing, in his admirable _Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie_,
thus characterises Erotomania in general: "The kernel of the whole
matter is the delusion of being singled out and loved by a person of the
other sex, who regularly belongs to a higher social sphere. And it
deserves to be noted that the love felt by the patient towards this
person is a romantic, ecstatic, but entirely ‘Platonic’ affection. In
this respect these patients remind one of the knight-errants and
minstrels of bygone times, whom Cervantes has so incisively lashed in
his _Don Quixote_....
"From the looks and gestures of the beloved individual they draw the
inference that they in return are not regarded with indifference. With
astonishing rapidity they lose their self-possession. The most harmless
incidents are regarded by them as signs of love, and an encouragement to
draw near. Even newspaper advertisements relating to others are supposed
to come from the person in question. Finally, hallucinations make their
appearance, by the aid of which the patients begin to be conversant with
the object of their love. Illusions also supervene; in the conversations
of others the patient fancies he hears references to his love-affairs.
He feels happy, exalted in his estimate of himself....
“At last the patient compromises himself by acting in consonance with
his delusion, thus making himself ridiculous and impossible in society,
and necessitating his confinement in an asylum.”