I read about this guy, we will call him Harry and maybe that is his name, can't remember,
anyway I saw this while doing research online and it kind of blew me away how the psychology of sex can under special circumstances actually shift and just how strange things can get.
Harry loves safety pins. He finds the shape, color, and shine of them so incredibly beautiful that just holding one gave him an intense feeling of pleasure. He called this special feeling ‘thought satisfaction’. Harry is a 38-year-old man who suffers from epilepsy and has a small brain legion on the brain in the left temporal area, he also has a lifelong fetish for safety pins. For him the safety pin provides him with the greatest of sexual experiences.
As a child, he collected safety pins, and his pockets were always bulging with them. His favorite game was to join them in a long chain and pull them along the floor. He knew it was an unusual and potentially embarrassing habit, so he would hide in the bathroom for his special safety pin time, pulling the pins out of his pockets one a time and staring at them shining in his palm. Sometime during his childhood, the ‘thought satisfaction’ was followed by a ‘blank period’, which was eventually diagnosed as a seizure when Harry was an adult.
Harry kept this safety pin habit secret from his family and nobody actually witnessed it until after he was married, this was his wife. He was 23 years old when his wife found him in the bathroom staring at a safety pin in his palm; he was glassy-eyed, vague, and unresponsive. He he ended up having a routine electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures the electrical activity in the brain, and it showed seizure activity in his left temporal lobe. Harry was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy.
Not all seizures result in someone falling down and shaking on the ground. There are other types of seizures where the synchronous electrical activity remains ‘focal’, or only in one part of the brain, so the effects are subtler. For example, temporal lobe seizures are restricted to the temporal lobe, and they cause less obvious changes in behavior.
People who have temporal lobe seizures describe feeling like they have ‘missed time’. Observers say that they stare blankly or appear vague. They might pick at their clothing. They often look like they are chewing something. These seizures typically last a few minutes. They are unpredictable and can occur at any time of the day or night.
In Harry’s case, seizures seemed to be triggered by a safety pin, and therefore they were essentially voluntary. It had to be a bright, shiny, undamaged pin, and several were more effective than just one. His seizures always followed the same pattern: he would stare at a safety pin and start humming, make sucking movements with his lips, pluck at his clothing, and fall into an unresponsive state for a couple of minutes. On one occasion she watched him walk backwards while humming into the bedroom and dress in his wife's underwear.
Harry strongest desire to look at safety pins where during anxiety-provoking and sexual situations. If he fantasized about safety pins during sex, he would have a seizure. He heavily lusted after after safety pins describing experiencing ‘thought satisfaction’ triggered by safety pins as one of his greatest experiences.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), a paraphilia is an intense or persistent sexual interest in something other than ‘genital stimulation or preparatory fondling with phenotypically normal, physically mature, consenting human partners’. A common type of paraphilia is a ‘fetish’, which is a sexual preference for a particular body part or inanimate object, such as Harry’s safety pins. Harry had the unique combination of both a safety pin fetish, and seizures triggered by safety pins.
Harry tried all the anti-seizure medications known at the time – this was the 1950s – with no benefit. Eventually he was referred for neurosurgery. In March of 1953, he underwent a left temporal lobectomy. You only get to be considered for a ‘temporal lobectomy’, or removal of the temporal lobe where the seizures are coming from, if your seizures are ‘intractable’ – that is, severe, frequent and unable to be controlled by anti-seizure medication.
Harry’s surgery was considered a great success: it cured him of both his seizures and his safety pin fetish. The case notes from his review 16 months after his surgery state that he had ‘no desire to look at safety pins and had become as potent as in early marriage’, and that his relationship with his wife improved. It doesn’t provide any more details about their relationship, pre- or post-surgery, but no doubt his wife would have been relieved.
You have to wonder if our more advanced anti-seizure medications would have been more effective; he may not require a left temporal lobectomy to experience both a seizure and fetish cure now. Had it not been for his intractable seizures he never would have received surgery to simply stop a fetish and would likely been left with it lifelong.
Although this case study is over 60 years old, it remains extraordinary – for the unique nature of the fetish, its clear association with temporal lobe epilepsy, and its unequivocal evidence that the temporal lobe is a crucial part of the ‘sexual neural network’ or the brain regions controlling our sex drive and behavior. After reading this case study, I never looked at safety pins the same way again, and I’m sure you will feel the same.
References
Mitchell, W., Falconer, M., & Hill, D. (1954). Epilepsy with fetishism relieved by temporal lobectomy. Lancet, 264(6839), 626–630.
Harry loves safety pins. He finds the shape, color, and shine of them so incredibly beautiful that just holding one gave him an intense feeling of pleasure. He called this special feeling ‘thought satisfaction’. Harry is a 38-year-old man who suffers from epilepsy and has a small brain legion on the brain in the left temporal area, he also has a lifelong fetish for safety pins. For him the safety pin provides him with the greatest of sexual experiences.
As a child, he collected safety pins, and his pockets were always bulging with them. His favorite game was to join them in a long chain and pull them along the floor. He knew it was an unusual and potentially embarrassing habit, so he would hide in the bathroom for his special safety pin time, pulling the pins out of his pockets one a time and staring at them shining in his palm. Sometime during his childhood, the ‘thought satisfaction’ was followed by a ‘blank period’, which was eventually diagnosed as a seizure when Harry was an adult.
Harry kept this safety pin habit secret from his family and nobody actually witnessed it until after he was married, this was his wife. He was 23 years old when his wife found him in the bathroom staring at a safety pin in his palm; he was glassy-eyed, vague, and unresponsive. He he ended up having a routine electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures the electrical activity in the brain, and it showed seizure activity in his left temporal lobe. Harry was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy.
Not all seizures result in someone falling down and shaking on the ground. There are other types of seizures where the synchronous electrical activity remains ‘focal’, or only in one part of the brain, so the effects are subtler. For example, temporal lobe seizures are restricted to the temporal lobe, and they cause less obvious changes in behavior.
People who have temporal lobe seizures describe feeling like they have ‘missed time’. Observers say that they stare blankly or appear vague. They might pick at their clothing. They often look like they are chewing something. These seizures typically last a few minutes. They are unpredictable and can occur at any time of the day or night.
In Harry’s case, seizures seemed to be triggered by a safety pin, and therefore they were essentially voluntary. It had to be a bright, shiny, undamaged pin, and several were more effective than just one. His seizures always followed the same pattern: he would stare at a safety pin and start humming, make sucking movements with his lips, pluck at his clothing, and fall into an unresponsive state for a couple of minutes. On one occasion she watched him walk backwards while humming into the bedroom and dress in his wife's underwear.
Harry strongest desire to look at safety pins where during anxiety-provoking and sexual situations. If he fantasized about safety pins during sex, he would have a seizure. He heavily lusted after after safety pins describing experiencing ‘thought satisfaction’ triggered by safety pins as one of his greatest experiences.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), a paraphilia is an intense or persistent sexual interest in something other than ‘genital stimulation or preparatory fondling with phenotypically normal, physically mature, consenting human partners’. A common type of paraphilia is a ‘fetish’, which is a sexual preference for a particular body part or inanimate object, such as Harry’s safety pins. Harry had the unique combination of both a safety pin fetish, and seizures triggered by safety pins.
Harry tried all the anti-seizure medications known at the time – this was the 1950s – with no benefit. Eventually he was referred for neurosurgery. In March of 1953, he underwent a left temporal lobectomy. You only get to be considered for a ‘temporal lobectomy’, or removal of the temporal lobe where the seizures are coming from, if your seizures are ‘intractable’ – that is, severe, frequent and unable to be controlled by anti-seizure medication.
Harry’s surgery was considered a great success: it cured him of both his seizures and his safety pin fetish. The case notes from his review 16 months after his surgery state that he had ‘no desire to look at safety pins and had become as potent as in early marriage’, and that his relationship with his wife improved. It doesn’t provide any more details about their relationship, pre- or post-surgery, but no doubt his wife would have been relieved.
You have to wonder if our more advanced anti-seizure medications would have been more effective; he may not require a left temporal lobectomy to experience both a seizure and fetish cure now. Had it not been for his intractable seizures he never would have received surgery to simply stop a fetish and would likely been left with it lifelong.
Although this case study is over 60 years old, it remains extraordinary – for the unique nature of the fetish, its clear association with temporal lobe epilepsy, and its unequivocal evidence that the temporal lobe is a crucial part of the ‘sexual neural network’ or the brain regions controlling our sex drive and behavior. After reading this case study, I never looked at safety pins the same way again, and I’m sure you will feel the same.
References
Mitchell, W., Falconer, M., & Hill, D. (1954). Epilepsy with fetishism relieved by temporal lobectomy. Lancet, 264(6839), 626–630.
36-40, M
