Psychopathia Sexualis

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Psychopathia Sexualis : A Historic Peepshow of Sexual Pathology and Criminology Appealing to Scholars, Artists and Common People Alike Krafft-Ebing spent thirteen years in the Styrian capital. He was aware that separating psychiatry from neurology would be incompatible with fruitful effectiveness in both fields, and following constant efforts in this direction, his professorship was expanded to include both psychiatry and neurology. During his work at Feldhof and in the Graz clinic, Krafft-Ebing laid the foundation for his global fame. Within a few years, his name spread across the entire world. Patients came to him from many countries. For the increasing number of patients from wealthy families, he built a state-of-the-art Private clinic in Mariagrün for the time. An earlier industrial revolution in the West spelled great gains in technology and the sciences, as well as the faith that people put into scientists’ ability to explain the world in which we found ourselves. Johnson, J (1973), "Psychopathia Sexualis.", The Manchester Medical Gazette (published December 1973), vol.53, no.2, pp.32–4, PMID 4596802 The psychiatric understanding of perversion signalled that in the modern experience, sexuality, as a distinct impulse with its particular internal physical and psychological mechanisms, dissociated itself from other social domains and began to generate its own meanings. As such, sexuality became associated with profound and complex human emotions and anxieties. Foucault rightly understood the continuity of nineteenth-century psychiatric interference with sexuality and the present-day craving for self-expression. Both are based on the confessional model that proclaims sexuality to be the key to individual authenticity and identity. However, I would argue that Foucault’s assessment of this model of sexuality as limiting possibilities is one-sided. It is more than an instrument of professional power and social control. The formation and articulation of sexual identities only became possible in a self-conscious, reflexive bourgeois society in which there was a dialectic between humanitarian reform and emancipation on the one hand, and efforts to enforce social adaptation and integration on the other. The elaboration of psychological explanations of various sexual tastes at the end of the nineteenth century was advanced by professional psychiatry, as well as by the historical development of individualisation and social democratisation.

The twelfth and final edition of Psychopathia Sexualis presented four categories of what Krafft-Ebing called " cerebral neuroses": Dr. Krafft-Ebing served as a medical superintendent at a German mental asylum from 1872-1880. The institution functioned more as a prison than a hospital. Krafft-Ebing’s tenure at the asylum afforded him access to patients with a cadre of mental ailments, including those who committed crimes with sexual overtures. He began collecting case studies of his patients, which he used as fodder for his medico-forensic analysis. The original version of the text featured 42 case studies but expanded to 238 case studies by its twelfth edition. The predominant emphasis on the purportedly first-hand patient accounts, which could be considered as confessional narratives, may be the key factor in both the book’s longstanding interest and its voyeuristic cultish appeal. The psychological dimension of sexuality first appeared as a typical constituent not of ‘normal’ heterosexuality but of perversion and masturbation. As Krafft-Ebing explained, certain mental stimuli, such as fantasies, prevented the spontaneous physiological process that supposedly characterised normal sexuality from taking its course. Later, however, he also drew attention to the decisive role of the mind in the development of sexuality in general. He considered normal sexual functioning as more than just the physical ability to have intercourse. Likewise, the satisfaction of the sexual urge was not only made up of physical release but also of emotional fulfilment. Moll’s discussion of the Contrectation drive implied a similar view. Both he and Krafft-Ebing postulated a complicated interaction between body and mind, including, as Krafft-Ebing phrased it, the ‘unconscious life of the soul’. 84Krafft-Ebing became deeply interested in the study of the subject. He elaborated an evolutionist theory considering homosexuality as an anomalous process developed during the gestation of the embryo and fetus, evolving into a "sexual inversion" of the brain. Some years later, in 1901, he corrected himself in an article published in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, changing the term "anomaly" to "differentiation." Krafft-Ebing's final conclusions remained forgotten for many years, partly because Sigmund Freud's theories captivated the attention of those that considered homosexuality a "psychological problem" (as did the majority at the time), and partly because Krafft-Ebing had incurred some enmity from the Austrian Catholic church by associating the desire for sanctity and martyrdom with hysteria and masochism (besides denying the perversity of homosexuals). Hertoft, Preben (2002), "Psychotherapeutic treatment of sexual dysfunction—or from sex therapy to marital therapy", Ugeskrift for Læger (published 7 October 2002), vol.164, no.41, pp.4805–8, PMID 12407889

Find sources: "Psychopathia Sexualis"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( July 2018) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) whether she had a lover. B. Anæsthesia Sexualis (Absence of Sexual Feeling). 1. As a Congenital Anomaly. A wide array of actors has attempted to get at just what human sexuality is, how it comes to be, and how it might be altered, if at all. For centuries, religion and its constitutive texts, rules, and prescriptions held the most authority when it came to the “truth” of sexuality. But toward the end of the 19th century, things began to change. This does not necessarily mean that the way individuals understood their sexual self should be considered as a reflection of an internal, psychological essence. Neither psychiatric case histories nor autobiographies are unmediated sources for the voices of the sexual self. Sexual identities crystallised as patterned narratives. As such, their content and form were of a social rather than of a psychological origin. For the materialisation of sexual identity, a cultural model, a script, was necessary. 90 In this respect, the psychiatric case history method and, connected to it, the effects of self-confession and, in Philippe Weber’s words, ‘the drive to narrate’, played a crucial role. 91 Hence, the case histories offered a fitting framework to look at and understand one’s self by making sexual desires and experiences an integral part of one’s life history. Sexual identity presumed a reflexive awareness, an ability to interrogate the past from the perspective of the present, and to tell a coherent story about one’s life in the light of what might be anticipated for the future. Above all, the story of one’s life was told as a continuous process with an inner logic leading up to the present situation. 92

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Volkmar Sigusch: History of Sexual Science. Campus, Frankfurt am Main et al., 2008, ISBN 978-3-593-38575-4, p. 191. Krafft-Ebing’s and Moll’s publications offered a public forum in which sexual desire, in the form of autobiographical narrative, could be articulated, understood and justified. The genres of the psychiatric case history, in which a diagnosis was made by reconstructing the past life of the patient from the perspective of the present, and of the autobiography, merged seamlessly. For many of Krafft-Ebing’s and Moll’s patients and correspondents, the whole process of telling or writing their life history, giving coherence and intelligibility to their torn self, might result in a ‘catharsis’ of comprehension. In fact, most of them did not need or want medical treatment because pouring out one’s heart was something of a cure in itself. Their detailed self-examinations and the belief that their sexual desire and behaviour expressed something deep and fixed from within the inner self were crucial in the development of sexual identity. Small Chronicle - Vienna, April 2 - From the University (right column below), in: Neue Freie Presse, Morning Paper, No. 8839, April 3, 1889, p. 4 In 1868, von Krafft-Ebing set up his own practice as a neurologist in Baden-Baden. At the beginning of his career, he looked after his younger, severely ill brother Friedrich for several months. After losing the battle for his brother’s life, who was just 24, a restorative and art-focused journey, coupled with visits to psychiatric and neurological institutions, took him several weeks through southern Europe. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71), he first served as a field doctor with the rank of captain in the Baden Division and was then transferred as a hospital doctor to the Fortress Rastatt. His observations, especially regarding patients suffering from typhus, were compiled in a special treatise. After the end of the war, he was put in charge of the electrotherapeutic station in Baden-Baden, mainly for the neurological follow-up treatment of wounded soldiers.