Krafft-Ebing Research Articles

Pedophilia-Social Shame at present

Presently in the society main pathetic and cruel news is sexual harassment as well as molestation towards children, girls,women even old age people also. By keeping this concept to make people aware have taken this initiation to put lighton a very interesting topic i.e. Pedophilia. Pedophilia is a type of illness in conventional usage, a psychosexual disorder,commonly affecting adults, manifested by sexual interest in preteen children or attempts to engage in sexual acts withprepubescent children. The word pedophilia originates from the Greek παῖς, παιδός (paîs, paidós) means “child”, andφιλία (philía), “friendly love” or “friendship”. The term paedophilia erotica was thought up in an 1886 article by theViennese psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,fourth edition text revised the fantasies, sexual urges or behaviors must cause clinically significant distress or impairmentin social, occupational or other important areas of daily functioning. Some psychological treatment ways for treating thisdisease are Cognitive-behavioral Therapy (CBT), Psychodynamic Therapy, Neurobiological Interventions etc.

La pasión esclava: alianzas masoquistas en La Regenta

La pasión esclava: alianzas masoquistas en La Regenta

The History of Gender-Affirming Vaginoplasty Technique

Evidence of gender variance is present throughout all societies of human history, dating back to the earliest cultures of which we have anthropologic record.1 The phenomenon first came to the attention of modern medicine around the turn of the twentieth century, where it was described as a psychiatric illness by Richard von Krafft-Ebing and other early sexologists.1,2 With the primordial classification of the condition as a form of delusional disorder, all means of psychotherapy were attempted to convince patients to abandon the belief they were trapped in the wrong sex body and to accept their assigned gender.

Normal enough? Krafft-Ebing, Freud, and homosexuality

This article analyses the slippery notions of the normal and normality in select works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and argues that homosexuality became a ‘boundary object’ between the normal and the abnormal in their works. Constructing homosexuality as ‘normal enough’ provided these two key thinkers of the fin de siècle with an opportunity to challenge societal and medical norms: Krafft-Ebing did this through mapping perversions; Freud, by challenging perceived norms about sexual development more broadly. The article submits that the scientific logic presented in Krafft-Ebing’s seminal case study compilation Psychopathia Sexualis and Freud’s early theoretical writings and cases, including Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), was itself haunted by notions of norms and the normal that were not always easy to resolve, and sometimes involved a certain amount of inspired conjecture on the part of both thinkers in order to develop and validate their differing tripartite models of normality. Krafft-Ebing imagined homosexuality as a variation of the normal by generalizing a gay male experience. He also recorded the obstreperous cases of homosexual women based largely inside the clinic but by and large ignored this evidence. Freud inextricably bound homosexuality to normality (and vice versa) by redefining homosexuals as a group to include individuals with unconscious same-sex desire. Doing so allowed him to conceptualize the fear of homosexuality as crucial in the formation of neurosis and psychosis, and at the same time put him at odds with relevant early identity politics.

Sadism: a history of non-consensual sexual cruelty

Sadism is a concept that is applied to rape–torture and rape–murder as well as the pleasures of consensual sadomasochism. From the 1890s, forensic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing was responsible for popularising the term. This article explores Krafft-Ebing’s understanding of the “degenerative” sadist and looks at how popular and psychiatric ideas changed over the past century. Why did it quickly become a common term in society? Why was sadism regarded as a “perversion” of “normal” male sexuality? In forensic terms, one interesting thing about the invention of sadism is why it needed to be coined in the first place. What was it about the sexual that necessitated a different category?

Freudian theories of homosexual development

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Jean-Martin Charot, and Havelock Ellis were a few antecedents to Sigmund Freud in identifying, defining, and theorizing the development of homosexuality. However, the majority subscribed to the thought that homosexuality was congenital, albeit unnatural. Havelock Ellis offered some psychological considerations to the condition of homosexuality and was said to have paved the way for more significant developmental explanations that began with Freud. According to Caprio (1954) the congenital theories prior to Freud became “obsolete” (p. 3). Because of the contributions of Freud, psychoanalysts that followed him such as Sandor Rado, Edmund Bergler, Irving Bieber, Lionel Ovesey, and Charles Socarides, to name a few, took on views that homosexuality was developmental in nature. During the phallic phase of development Freud made a pivotal discovery about the oedipal complex. This and other theories of psychosexual development are overviewed. It is important to get an understanding of the basic construct of theory given the rise of deconstruction and reconstruction undertakings.

Liberalism's Perverse Pleasures: Coercive Contract in <em>Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</em>

This article argues that Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde posits a theory of liberalism. It reads the dynamics of consent and coercion in Stevenson's novel in conversation with two very different nineteenth-century conceptualizations of liberalism's animating form, contract: legal theorist Henry Maine's history of contract and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Richard von Krafft-Ebing's writings on masochism. Masochism presents an anomaly for Mainian liberal theory in that it represents the willed annihilation of individual agency. Stevenson's novel, however, demonstrates that masochism represents liberalism's organizing logic: the contractualism that liberal theory fetishizes is the mechanism by which coercion simultaneously is integrated into and concealed within ostensibly consensual forms of association.

Fetishist disorder

Fetishism, as a technical descriptor of atypical sexual behaviour, was noted in the writings of the well-known nineteenth century French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911) (Binet, 1887) as well as prominent European sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) (Krafft-Ebing, 1886), Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) (Ellis, 1906), and Magnus Hirschfeld (1868– 1935) (Hirschfeld, 1956). In their seminal writings, all of the afore mentioned sexologists used the terms “fetish” and “fetishism” to specifically describe an intense eroticization of either non-living objects and/or specific body parts that were symbolically associated with a person. Fetishes could be non clinical manifestations of a normal spectrum of eroticization or clinical disorders causing significant interpersonal difficulties. Ellis (1906) observed that body secretions or body products could also become fetishist expressions of “erotic symbolism”. Freud (1928) considered both body parts (e.g., the foot) or objects associated with the body (e.g., shoes) as fetish objects. For the purposes of this review, a “broader” historically based core definition for Fetishism will include intense and recurrent sexual arousal to: non-living objects, an exclusive focus on body parts or body products. Keywords: fetishism, Paraphilia, Partialism, DSM-V.

Hofmannsthal: Jahrbuch zur europäischen Moderne 25 ed. by Maximilian Bergengruen et al.

Reviewed by: Hofmannsthal: Jahrbuch zur europäischen Moderne 25 ed. by Maximilian Bergengruen et al. Raymond L. Burt Maximilian Bergengruen, Alexander Honold, Gerhard Neumann, Ursula Renner, Günter Schnitzler, and Gotthart Wunberg, eds., Hofmannsthal: Jahrbuch zur europäischen Moderne 25. Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 2017. 306 pp. Since 1968 the Hugo von Hofmannsthal Gesellschaft has had an active publication record to support the promotion of Hofmannsthal studies, beginning with the Hofmannsthal-Blätter, which focused on unpublished sources on the poet’s life and work and adding in 1971 a companion series, Hofmannsthal-Forschungen, that presented findings of scholars delivered at conferences or addressing specified topics. In 1993, these two publications were merged under the title of Hofmannsthal: Jahrbuch zur europäischen Moderne; the resultant periodical expanded its scope to place the poet’s life and work within the wider context of European Modernism. For its twenty-fifth year, the editors have selected seven contributions that add perspective to the life and works of Frank Wedekind, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Karl Kraus and Arthur Schnitzler (as well as, of course, Hofmannsthal). Such collections may often be mined by scholars in search of a particular author or topic, whereas others may read the book in its entirety for insight into contemporary research with its variety of approaches and interpretive methodologies. In this volume, some of the articles proceed logically and methodically, and others surprise the reader with the creative twists and turns they take through their unexpected connections. The opening article by Klaus Bohnenkamp falls among the former and constitutes almost half of the pages dedicated to articles. His “‘Wir haben diesen Dichter geliebt . . .’: Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Eduard Korrodi: Briefe und Dokumente” delivers a meticulously researched investigation of the interaction of the Austrian poet with Korrodi, a Swiss journalist and the longtime editor of the [End Page 123] Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Bohnenkamp tracks every reference to Hoffmannsthal in Korrodi’s writings from 1917 to Hofmannsthal’s death in 1929. He follows Korrodi’s comments on publications from the Hofmannthal’s papers, with special attention to the novel fragment Andreas. Also included are Korrodi’s critique of Hofmannsthal’s works published in anthologies and performances of Hofmannsthal’s plays on in the German-language stage up to 1952. The essay is followed by the printing of the existent correspondence between Hofmannsthal and Korrodi and ends with Korrodi’s Nachruf of Hofmannsthal from 1929. Another example is “Selbstsucht und Selbstsuche: Schnitzlers Psychopoetik des Narzissmus,” in which Michael Navratil postulates that a general, dominant tendency can be drawn out of Schnitzler’s works revealing the defining role of narcissism in the psychological profile of his protagonists. To illustrate his thesis, Navratil ends the essay with an interpretation of Schnitzler’s “Die Frau des Richters.” In order to show the influence of Ecclesiastes on Hofmannsthal’s writings, Heinz Rölleke uses parallel textual comparisons in his “Hofmannsthal und das alttestamentarische Buch ‘Kohelet’” to great effect. Beginning with the indirect influence on the opening lines of Jedermann, he proceeds to a detailed analysis of Hofmannthal’s “Ballade des äußeren Lebens” in which he shows the unfiltered inspiration it draws from this most enigmatic book of wisdom in the biblical canon. Inspiration of a different sort of book on literature is taken up by Daniel Hilpert in his contribution, “‘Mein Fleisch heißt Lulu’: Eugenik und Sexualpathologie in Frank Wedekinds ‘Die Büchse der Pandora. Eine Monstretragödie.’” The book in question is Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). Hilpert places Wedekind’s literary production within the cultural context of the late nineteenth century, in which deviance in sexuality, race, and art were seen by many as a sign of a cultural collapse. The scientific discussion about eugenics inspired Wedekind to bring the themes of sexual pathology and eugenics into literature. Wedekind is dealing not only with the character of Lulu but with the construction of the entire plot by using Krafft-Ebing’s descriptions of sexual pathology as the narrative framework. On the artistic end of the spectrum, Johannes Ungelenk’s contribution, “Rainer Maria Rilkes ‘Die Flamingos’: Ein Kling(-ge-)ding,” starts with the traditional genre analysis of this sonnet as...

Sexology, Popular Science and Queer History in Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others).

Sexology, Popular Science and Queer History in Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others).

Leon Wachholz, zapomniany polski kryminolog

Leon Wachholz (1867-1942) was a professor of forensic medicine at the JagiellonianUniversity, Cracow (Poland).He made his way into the history of forensic sciences as an eminent specialistin forensic medicine, promoter of experimental methods and a teacher of a wholegeneration of Polish professors of forensic medicine. He tutored professors: Jan Ol -brycht (Cracow), Wlodzimierz Sieradzki (Lwow), Stefan Horoszkiewicz (Poznan), andwrote the first modern Polish handbook of forensic medicine, published in Cracowin 1899.Leon Wachholz was also a historian of medicine, the author of many interestingarticles in the field, whereas his scientific achievements in the field of criminology,although attractive and valuable, now remain practically unknown.Nevertheless, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was typical of forensicmedicine professors to deal with criminology. Those who did include pioneers of contemporary criminology, to mention for example Cesare Lombroso in Italy or Alexand reLacassange in France. Therefore, Wachholz’s interest in criminology was natural forhis time.Wachholz’s first work in criminology was the higher doctorate (“habilitation”)lecture O obledzie moralnym z punktu widzenia antropologii kryminalnej (“On moralinsanity from the point of view of criminal anthropology”), published in 1894.His most valuable contributions to criminology include Wojna a zbrodnia (“Warand crime”), published in 1922 in Poland and Germany, and Alkoholizm a przestepstwo(“Alcoholism and crime”), published in 1927.Other notable works in criminology, more exactly in forensic sexuology, includedO przewrotnym popedzie plciowym (“On perversive sexual drive”), published in 1892,and O morderstwie z lubiezności (“Murder motivated by sex”, in German: “Der Lustmord”),published in 1900.Both above-mentioned works show a visible influence of Richard von Krafft-Ebing(author of the famous Psychopathia sexualis), in whose Viennese clinic Wachholz heldan internship immediately after graduation.Wachholz’s point of view on the aetiology of crime was expressed in the bookMedycyna kryminalna (“Medicine for investigators”) written together with Professor Jan Olbrycht, as well as in the extensive eulogy published after the death of CesareLombroso (1910).Wachholz’s works in criminology prove that the his view on the aetiology of crimeand the criminal gradually evolved. Why do people commit crime and acts of violence?As far as he seemed to follow the individual (anthropological, biological aspects,like Cesare Lombroso or Richard von Krafft-Ebing), in his later works he appreciatedthe impact of social factors on crime (e.g. Alexandre Lacassange, Gabriel Tarde or Franzvon Liszt). Ultimately, his views placed him among positivists-multicausalists such asEnrico Ferri. Later, in the early 1930s, having read Johann Lange and Heinrich Kranzon the criminality of twins, he remained within the realm of multicausality, yet wasready to recognise the biological, individual element as dominant.Towards the end of his life, in 1937, Wachholz formulated his original theoryof criminality, which he called “The Right of Contrast” (in Polish: prawo kontrastu).Making some reference to metaphysics and categories of “good” and “evil”, he divergedfrom the fundamental foundations of positivism, which he had followed nearly for allhis scientific life.

Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914 by Scott Spector

Reviewed by: Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914 by Scott Spector Kerry Wallach Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914. By Scott Spector. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 296. Paper $25.00. ISBN 978-0226196787. The question “who is the murderer?” remains at the heart of countless media scandals today, just as over a century ago; many rely on graphic images of violence, brutality, and criminal activity. Scott Spector’s long-awaited book eloquently demonstrates that the fascination with such spectacles dates back to the 1860s, with the rise of media scandals about sexual practices (especially between men) and their potential connections to violent criminal acts. Ritual murder accusations that gained momentum in the 1880s made for Central European versions of the Dreyfus Affair, which strained Christian-Jewish relations and put allegedly treacherous Jews on trial. The fin-de-siècle, when killers similar to London’s Jack the Ripper and other marginal or degenerate figures came to signify urban modernity, marks a further turning point in this history. It was also around 1900 when new sensationalist texts about the criminality of the metropolis proliferated. Violent figures associated with the city became the subjects of modern scientific studies, legal investigations, and medical diagnoses. Yet in some cases they also emerged as subjects on their own terms. In rejecting the sufficiency of the “marginalization thesis” embraced by Richard Evans and others (namely that marginal figures merely validated more centered identities), Spector shifts the conversation toward a dialectical analytic that brings together “enlightened” and “decadent” discourses (2–3). Scientific, legal, and medical texts constitute the enlightened sources; [End Page 178] newspaper articles and popular books make up the decadent. Although Vienna and Berlin are the primary focus of this study, which innovatively explores cultural phenomena across national borders, noteworthy events elsewhere in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire also receive attention. One of the book’s major claims makes it required reading for historians and German studies scholars alike: it was not after World War I, but rather in the decades prior to the war, when violent fantasies emerged on a mass scale. By positioning World War I “not as a cause but as a symptom” (14), Spector suggests that Weimar scholarship—on Lustmord, criminality, and sexuality, among other topics—must look to earlier decades for the origins of interwar-era incarnations (170, 196). The fin-de-siècle represents an especially key moment: Otto Weininger, Robert Musil, and, to a lesser degree, Sigmund Freud factor into Spector’s portrait of this time. In addition to its in-depth look at individual texts and criminal cases, the book also offers an early history of the fields of criminology, criminal psychology, and forensics. For Spector, Austrian Hanns Gross serves as a real-life Sherlock Holmes (56). German responses to the early criminal anthropological work of Cesare Lombroso, which privileged physical signs of degeneration ranging from forehead shape to tattoos, lead to a fascinating discussion of criminal accountability (Zurechnungsfähigkeit). Here we see the growing authority of expert witnesses and their knowledge, a trope that runs throughout the book. Spector makes the powerful argument that the fixation on “twilight conditions” or border states (Dämmerzustände) including epilepsy, somnambulism, alcoholism, and religious fanaticism, points to a rejection of will and a privileging of innate characteristics as explanations for crime or violence (252). Sexuality is at the core of several chapters on homosexuality and Lustmord, and scholars of gender and sexuality will find this history indispensable to understanding work on later developments in sexology. In weaving together various theories of homosexuality, Spector emphasizes the early conflation of same-sex and violent sexual practices, as well as the crime scandals that brought many alleged homosexuals into the limelight. The coinage of such terms as Urning (same-sex attraction) by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and homosexual by Karóly Kertbeny (Karl-Maria Benkert) predates and informs the important work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld. One scandalous court case from 1889 led Krafft-Ebing to write the first article on lesbianism (Gynandrie); the story of Sándor (Sarolta) Vay here leads us to...

Délire de revendication et quérulence : une revue de la littérature

ObjectiveThis literature review set out to describe the history and the evolutions in German-, English- and French-speaking countries of a psychiatric notion, “litigious delusion”. The author focuses on a subgroup taking the form of querulent delusion or querulousness (a pathological tendency towards litigious behaviors). MethodologyThe author studies writings by legal and psychiatric specialists in French, English and German from the middle of the 19th century (first mention of the diagnostic entity Querulantenwahn by the German psychiatrist Johann Ludwig Casper) to the present day. He closely follows the evolution of the notion of Querulantenwahn in Germany and describes the contributions by experts such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Emil Kraepelin and Kurt Schneider. In France, he shows how Taguet and Pottier's délire des persécutés–persécuteurs became a subgroup of Cullerre and De Clérambault's délire de revendication (litigious delusion). Finally, he explains why these categories have not been studied more in depth in English-speaking countries with reference to work by experts in psychiatry and by legal specialists. ResultsThe concepts of querulousness and litigious delusion have had different outcomes according to the country. In Germany, the Querulantenwahn is a clinical entity still mentioned in psychiatric manuals, although it now refers to a personality disorder. In France, psychiatrists prefer to use the term querulousness (quérulence), a notion that is incorporated into the category of paranoid delusions. In English-speaking countries, querulous individuals are liable not to be addressed to psychiatric care, and tend to be known as vexatious litigants, a judicial term that prevents them from accessing the courts. DiscussionThe author sheds light on the reasons why the definition of querulousness seems so divergent from one country to another; he proposes a reflection on the disappearance of litigious delusion as a clinical concept. ConclusionsFurther reflection on the nosographic status of the concepts of querulousness and litigious delusion is required to determine their correct positioning in psychiatric classifications. Meanwhile, new institutional responses adapted to the psychiatric and legal situation of so-called “querulous” persons need to be elaborated.

Snowy Campbell, Australian Pioneer Investigator of the Brain by Malcolm Macmillan

Health & History Ɣ 19/1 Ɣ 2017 127 Malcolm Macmillan, Snowy Campbell, Australian Pioneer Investigator of the Brain (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016). ISBN 978-1-925333-74-9 (PB) B&W and colour illustrations, xi + 390 pp. PioneeringAustralian neurologist, neuropathologist, and psychiatrist, Alfred Walter (‘Snowy’) Campbell, was notoriously reticent—as well as somewhat playful—about his medical achievements. When asked what he did during a period in England in the 1890s and early 1900s when he conducted a bevy of gifted research studies, he responded that when he wasn’t playing cricket he was shooting grouse! In this commendable biography by psychologist, Malcolm Macmillan, we learn that his modesty was matched by tenacity in grasping the opportunities that came his way. Campbell (1868–1937) was the sports-loving son of an innovative NSW farm manager of Scottish, Danish, and French extraction and a plucky mother who stood up to a band of bushrangers in an 1863 attack on the family home. She died after childbirth in 1870, leaving three young children including two-year-old ‘Snowy’. In adolescence he attended Oaklands School in Mittagong, NSW, which provided a classical education for boys ‘from families of more considerable means’. After achieving ‘decidedly inauspicious’ results in the senior public examinations held by the University of Sydney, he gained entry to Edinburgh University where he studied medicine from 1885 to 1889, his results improving over the years but not, according to Macmillan, to the stellar levels sometimes claimed for him. Soon after qualifying in medicine and surgery in Edinburgh, Campbell passed the Certi¿cate of Experience in Psychological Medicine, a credential offered by the Medico-Psychological Association for Great Britain and Ireland. It enabled him to work in several English county mental asylums, where he found himself attracted to the scienti¿c side of the work. A year in Vienna and Prague followed, with Campbell catapulted into several new and developing ¿elds, combining histology, pathology and bacteriology. The boy from country NSW intended ‘to take of¿ce in one of the few large institutions then affording collateral facilities for general administrative experience and special scienti¿c study’, but his aspirations expanded in line with the laboratories he sampled. At ¿rst he worked as a voluntary assistant in the pathology laboratory of Professor Heinrich Obersteiner, from the Neurological 128 BOOK REVIEWS Institute in Vienna, who had just published a major work on the structure of the central nervous system. He then gained experience in the laboratories of Professor Richard von Krafft-Ebing, head of Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, and those of Professors Arnold Pick and Hans Chiari in Prague. It was an exciting time to be in Europe with ongoing progress in identifying clinical phases of mental diseases and pathological changes in the brain, and in devising new techniques for postmortem examinations at a time when germ theory was challenging old notions of pathology and disease causation. At the very least, Campbell greatly expanded his histopathological methods while abroad and, after returning to Edinburgh in 1892, wrote his MD (Doctor of Medicine) thesis. It focussed on the nervous system changes associated with ‘alcoholic neuritis’, a painful condition of the hands, feet, and limbs. The following year, and still only in his mid-twenties, he joined the Lancaster County Asylum, called Rainhill, near Liverpool where he quickly rose from assistant medical of¿cer to mental hospital pathologist. During the next twelve years, he completed some trailblazing studies, resulting in more than forty publications. The topics were diverse and resulted in a wealth of papers on topics including the histopathology of shingles (herpes zoster) in collaboration with up-and-coming English neurologist, Henry Head, and on the bacterial causes of colitis (asylum dysentery), which was almost endemic in many mental hospitals. He also carried out a study on the then quite controversial topic of the rib strength of asylum patients and their proneness to fracture. This may sound like a humdrum subject, but Macmillan brings it to life, explaining that Campbell’s study method and conclusions served to debunk a treasured theory of some senior colleagues while also raising the possibility of nefarious staff practices that might explain some of the bone breakages in asylums. In the years...

"Jeg er et højst fuldstændigt og fejlfrit eksemplar af racen, så jeg blev modtaget som en kostbar skat". Om amtsforvalter Poul Andræ (1843-1928), kontrærsexualiteten og lægerne

The Danish lawyer and public official Poul Georg Andræ (1843-1928) was born intoan affluent officer family, where his father, C.C.G. Andræ came to play a central politicalrole after the abolition of the absolute monarchy both as a minister and governmenthead. It was obvious that Poul and the younger brother Victor Andræ wouldstudy, and after they had become lawyers from the University of Copenhagen in themiddle of the 1860s, they were employed as public officials in the central administration.They were both unmarried, and with regards to Poul Andræ, it was clear to himearly on that his feelings and sexuality were only directed towards men. Throughsurviving diaries and a number of the letters that he wrote and received, we canfollow his struggle against his ”unfortunate love” as he called it quite closely. It tookplace through an ongoing dialogue with Danish doctors and psychiatrists, who in the1870s and 1880s were more or less at a loss to understand these new phenomena. In1891, Andræ travelled to Vienna to consult with the leading psychiatrist and sexologistof the time, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and although he was not able to offer himany treatment, he confirmed him to have been born contrasexual, in other words awoman in a man’s body, and in this way took away some of Andræ’s deep feelings ofguilt.In 1889, Poul Andræ applied for and received the position as county administratorin the small market town of Skanderborg in Jutland, but he soon regretted itbitterly. It was mainly to certify that he absolutely had to live in a large city that hesought out Krafft-Ebing two years later. With this certificate in hand, he resigned in1894 and moved back to Copenhagen, where he lived until his death at the age of84. Throughout his entire life he continued to struggle for sexual information andsexual equality; in particular, he became involved with the Wissenschaftlich HumanitarianCommittee, which was founded in 1897, and in his will he left considerablefunds to both the committee and to a number of books in Danish.

The History of Sexuality and Historical Methodology

Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality has been the subject of debate among historians for decades. More specifically, his assertion, ‘the sodomite was a temporary aberration, the homosexual was now a species,’ has been used to support an ‘acts-to-identity’ theory that locates in the late-nineteenth century a shift in thinking about sexuality. The author argues that a re-reading of Foucault shifts the focus of historical inquiry from identities towards the process of knowledge creation, allowing for ambiguity that the concept ‘identity’ might foreclose. This essay examines the debate and offers a new reading of Foucault based on the work of Lynne Huffer. Finally, the author seeks to centre a source-driven approach in conjunction with The History of Sexuality, providing readings of patients and informants from the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis.

Perversion, religion, et économie libidinale : l'origine de « La Notion de dépense »

Most commentaries on Georges Bataille's famous article, “The Notion of Expenditure,” emphasize the direct influence of Marcel Mauss's theory of the gift. This article returns to the “origin” of Bataille's text, namely, the intellectual debates around the Communist journal La Critique sociale (1931–1934), in order to understand its various sources. We insist in particular on the impact of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's psychopathological developments and of Freud's first libidinal theories. Bataille's understanding of reality in the early 1930s, despite his initiation to Marxian premises, is hardly based on “historical materialism.” It corresponds more to “a succession of vicious excessive research” opposing all laws and conventions of humanity. How does Bataille's interest in Krafft-Ebing's writing on perversion and religion create immediately a controversy among his Marxist colleagues? How do Freud's discoveries of infantile sexuality and a pleasure “without purpose” help Bataille in turn to construct a positive pole of asocial impulses, that he would later call the “unproductive expenditure”? This article gives an overview of these exchanges and debates.

The personal is scientific: Women, gender, and the production of sexological knowledge in Germany and Austria, 1900-1931.

This article addresses the roles women and gender played in the production of sexological knowledge in the early 20th century, particularly in German-speaking Europe. Although existing scholarship focuses almost exclusively on the work of "founding fathers" such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld, women in fact made important contributions to the field. Based on analysis of texts written between 1900 and 1931, this article shows how women were able to successfully mobilize their gender as a privileged form of "situated knowledge," and thereby assert their authority over and superior insights into certain subject areas, namely, female sexualities and sexual difference. At the same time, however, this article also highlights the constraints upon women's gendered standpoint. It shows that women's sexological writing was not just informed by their gender but also by their class and race. Moreover, because gender threatened to cast their work as insufficiently objective and scientific, women cleaved to sexology's rules of evidence and argumentation, and adopted the field's ideological trappings in order to participate in discursive contestations over sexual truths. By interrogating gender, this article introduces much-needed nuance into existing understandings of sexology, and reframes sexology itself as a site wherein new sexual subjectivities were imagined, articulated, and debated. However, it also raises fundamental questions about women sexologists' capacity to create knowledge about women and female sexualities that was truer, more correct, and more authentic than that produced by men.

The Enjoyment of Pure Reasoning

IntroductionThe French libertine novelist Donatien-Alphonse-Francois de Sade's (1740-1814) famous last request was that acorns should be sewn onto his tomb. He did not want his name or his literary works to be remembered by those who came after him. Soon after his death in 1814, however, it was clear that his wish would not come true: for example, the eponym 'sadism' appeared in the Dictionnaire universel de la langue francaise in 1834, and eminent writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert discussed his novels.1At the end of the nineteenth century, Sade's name appeared in a totally new context. The German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced 'sadism' as a clinical concept, and several psychiatrists started discussing Sade's life and work. One decade later, the French writer Guillaume Apollinaire published L'oeuvre du marquis de Sade, the first comprehensive study on Sade's life and work. Apollinaire's interest in Sade was followed by, among others, Maurice Heine, who discovered and published several of Sade's texts, and Gilbert Lely, who wrote the first detailed biography of Sade. During these years, the 'Divine Marquis,' as he was called, was also an important figure for the surrealists, who saw him as an intellectual companion in their revolt against bourgeois society.Despite this multi-faceted interest in Sade, however, the Marquis was not a central figure in the intellectual life of the past century, as Apollinaire had predicted he would be.2 Nevertheless, in the two decades after the Second World War, Marquis de Sade's novels were interpreted comprehensively by most of the leading French philosophers of that time: in 1947, Pierre Klossowski's study, Sade mon prochain,3 and Georges Bataille's secret de Sade4 were published, and twenty years later-after Simone de Beauvoir,5 Maurice Blanchot,6 and Jacques Lacan7 had released their interpretations of Sade-a reworked version of Klossowski's text8 and a new Sade study by Roland Barthes9 appeared.101967 was also the year that Gilles Deleuze published Coldness and Cruelty.11 This book has a special place in the long line of French Sade studies. As the French title, Presentation de Sacher-Masoch. Le froid et le cruel,12 suggests, it is not Sade's oeuvre but rather the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1835-1895) that occupies the bulk of Deleuze's study.13 However, Sade is far from absent in the text: Coldness and Cruelty is bookended by detailed interpretations of Sade's novels. Reading Sade in combination with Masoch reveals what is at stake in Coldness and Cruelty. In his long essay Deleuze argues that the unity of sadism and masochism, as expressed in the clinical concept of 'sadomasochism,' is a non-entity.14 Instead, apathy, reason, and the father are central for Sade, whereas coldness, imagination, and the mother characterize Masoch's universe.15When critics discuss Deleuze's anti-sado-masochistic thesis, no attention is paid to what he claims is one of the central characteristics of sadism: that Sade's libertines16 are, first and foremost, thinkers, and that their sexual enjoyment is derived from the activity of pure thinking.17 This thesis is remarkable, first, because it flies in the face of the widespread psychiatric interpretation of sadism. After all, Sade's characters are commonly thought to torture their victims because they enjoy the other's pain and suffering, not the free unfolding of pure thought. Deleuze's interpretation also runs counter to the other leading interpretations of Sade in French philosophy.18 Klossowski, for example, argues that the libertine's pleasure is not in thinking but in dreaming about torturing young virgins;19 Barthes, for his part, holds that the object of the sadist's enjoyment is the strict obedience to empty formal rules;20 and Bataille21 suggests that the sadist's enjoyment is an effect of transgressing the border between what Bataille calls 'the restricted economy' and 'the general economy. …

Exhaustion and the Pathologization of Modernity.

This essay analyses six case studies of theories of exhaustion-related conditions from the early eighteenth century to the present day. It explores the ways in which George Cheyne, George Beard, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Alain Ehrenberg and Jonathan Crary use medical ideas about exhaustion as a starting point for more wide-ranging cultural critiques related to specific social and technological transformations. In these accounts, physical and psychological symptoms are associated with particular external developments, which are thus not just construed as pathology-generators but also pathologized. The essay challenges some of the persistently repeated claims about exhaustion and its unhappy relationship with modernity.