“It was affecting the medical profession”: The history of masturbatory insanity revisited

Abstract

There is a considerable historiography of the Western panic over masturbation which began early in the eighteenth century and which still lingers in mutated forms in the twenty‐first century. This article looks in particular at the nineteenth‐century phenomenon of the rise of the belief, initially, that masturbation was a contributory cause of insanity, and, subsequently, that a particular and identifiable form of insanity was the outcome of self‐abuse. By the end of the century the patients' fears of having risked insanity through masturbation were increasingly being seen as more damaging than the practice itself, though this might be blamed for causing the lesser affliction of neurasthenia. A number of scholars – some of them practising psychoanalysts and psychiatrists – have addressed this subject over the past fifty years. An account is given of the most significant contributions to the subject, and the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments analysed. It is argued that there are still several unanswered questions about the rise of the idea of masturbation as mentally (as well as physically) deleterious, and its decline. Some suggestions are made for reasons why fears of masturbatory insanity became so acute in the mid to late nineteenth century, particularly, within the European context, in Britain (this article does not address the particular hysteria and ferocity manifested in North America). Hypotheses are advanced for the still unexplained decline of the strongest version of the theory of masturbatory insanity several decades before the end of the nineteenth century. It is particularly intriguing that this decline is perceptible in the writings of those who had previously been leading advocates of the theory. Social, medicopolitical, and personal factors were all doubtless contributory, but a number of questions on this apparently extensively researched topic remain open.