Krafft-Ebing Research Articles

On a Man Who Died from Reading Too Much Heidegger, or Richard Rorty as a Reader

He was born, worked, and died. So goes Martin Heidegger's famous biographical remark on Aristotle,1 and while tlus formula is in principle applicable to Richard Rorty too, in lus case it as well say, He was born, and died. This is how important reading was to Roity, on both a personal, and a scholarly level. This essay will deal primarily with latter, but would like to begin with former, taking as my stalling point Rorty's Intellectual Autobiography, published in volume of Library of Living Philosophers dedicated to work. As its cautious readers should remember quite well, that narrative opens with words, I have spent my life rummaging through libraries,' liminal position of which certainly gives them a ring of defining statement.That statement was by no means an exaggeration on Rorty's part. Indeed, we have all sorts of evidence to confirm that existence from a veiy early age onward was that of a dedicated bookworm obsessively consmned gargantuan quantities of books of fantastically different kinds. ' To get a sense of how early have started, consider that, as Neil Gross stresses, [wjhen was six, Roity himself wrote a play. Its topic was the coronation of Edward, Punce of Wales and staged it in front of his parents's friends, an audience that might well have included none other than famous poet Allen Tate.4 True, given Roity's parents were,5 one expect their son to have rather bookish hobbies. But tlus still does not diminish one's sense of astonishment upon learning that twelve year old Richard had already been acquainted with Leon Trotsky's History of Russian Revolution (or parts thereof), botanical literature on wild orchids, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis6 Or that at time when some kids enthuse about their pair of rollerblades, Rorty did so with lus, as himself put it, first pair of philosophers - Plato and Nietzsche - and spent lus days pondering how could aclueve a fusion of two. 'This life among texts seems to have continued until Rorty's veiy last days, or at least tlus is suggested by lus 2007 essay entitled The Fire of Life. There confessed that, having been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer, found consolation neither in philosophy, nor, God forbid, religion, but m poetiy, and stated that wished he had spent somewhat more of [lus] life with verse.8 In tins context, it will perhaps not be inappropriate to mention that tiled to defuse dreadfulness of lus illness with a joke that was also book-related, and which actually borrowed from daughter. Referring to fact that just a few years earlier Jacques had died from same type of cancer. Roily quipped, in a personal letter to Habennas, that illness must [have] come from 'reading too much Heidegger.'9 If making such jokes, and expressing such regrets, on one's deathbed is not ultimate proof of being a complete, hopeless, and dedicated bookwonn, then it is hard to imagine what is.Given that, as is clear from above, Rorty saw lus life, and death for that matter, through prism of books, it should come as no surprise that looked at other thinkers in same way. serves as a good reference point again, for not only did Rorty feel a certain kinship with latter as far their favorite authors were concerned, also recognized in him a fellow passionate reader - i.e. somebody who began devouring books as soon as [he] learned to read, somebody whose li[fe] w[as] saved by books.10 Tlus is expressed nowhere more clearly than in Rorty's contribution to symposium on Deconstmction and Pragmatism that took place in Pans in 1993, where Rorty compared invidiously to Michel Foucault by saying: Denida intensely admires great authors stand behind texts glosses; has no doubts about or their authorship . …

The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer by Lisa Downing (review)

Reviewed by: The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer by Lisa Downing Elizabeth Carroll Downing, Lisa. The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. 241. isbn: 0-226-00354-x In a thought-provoking book, The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer, Lisa Downing takes a topic normally reserved for courtrooms, television crime series, and supermarket tabloids, and forces scholars to consider serial murderers according to new historical and artistic perspectives. Downing articulates the ways in which modern serial killers become celebrities and exceptional human beings in the eyes of the public and press, and analyzes the social and cultural purposes their exceptionality serves. Downing pays particular attention to the ways in which gender determines our reaction to murderers. Finally, she considers the role the arts—fictional and non-fictional texts, documentaries, feature-length films, drawings, and paintings—either produced by the killers themselves or other people, play in construction of the “subject” murder. Notably absent from her book, however, is the media sensationalism that often accompanies modern serial killers’ cases. The Subject of Murder is thus unique among studies of modern serial killers. Previous scholars have alternatively focused on European discourses about the murderer-cum-artist, or used criminology and sexology to pathologize serial killers. Downing combines these two approaches to provide a fresh look at the subject of murder across a broad historical period. The first chapter of the study [End Page 282] provides an overview of the rise of the modern killer beginning in the late-eighteenth century with the Marquis de Sade, in the nineteenth century with the works of Cesare Lombroso and Richard von Krafft-Ebing regarding the science and psychology of the modern murderer, and continuing in the twentieth century with Michel Foucault. For each serial killer studied (see the chapter descriptions below), Downing then gives a close reading of the primary texts associated with the case—writings, testimonies, art pieces, court proceedings, etc. Finally, Downing analyzes each incident from a feminist perspective since, as she argues, it is rare to find discussions, scholarly or otherwise, in which a female murderer’s penchant for crime is not attributed to failed femininity. Each of the book’s seven chapters is devoted to one serial killer. The three nineteenth-century murders she discusses are France’s Pierre-François Lacenaire and Marie Lafarge, and England’s Jack the Ripper. For the twentieth century Downing considers British killers Myra Hindley and Dennis Nilsen, and American serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Selecting equal numbers of adult male and female serial killers allows Downing to deconstruct both masculinity and femininity. The final chapter is devoted to children who kill: Mary Bell, Jon Venables, and Robert Thompson from Britain, and the Columbine Shooters from the United States. In the chapter on children who kill, Downing finds that our shock at their crimes is attributed to the fact that children are deemed innocent and pure, and to kill goes against the very nature of childhood. Similarly, female serial killers are particularly aberrant because they behave in unnatural (i.e. unfeminine) ways. Although male serial killers are also reviled by the public, since the nineteenth century they have been met with a fascination and even an awe that dates back to the Romantic ideal of the exceptional human being. Downing ultimately demonstrates that modern serial killers are not exceptional subjects; they are products and producers of modern society. The chapters on Lacenaire and Jack the Ripper should prove particularly useful for nineteenth-century scholars since they were cult figures for Romantic and Republican writers such as Pétrus Borel, Alexandre Dumas, Gérard de Nerval, and Théophile Gautier. Lacenaire embodied the Baudelairian trope that man is simultaneously drawn to good and evil. These writers and artists lauded the killer for his exceptional status and his ability to create art through death. It is therefore not surprising that they and others, such as Victor Hugo, featured the celebrated criminal in their works. Hugo’s Le Dernier jour d’un condamné and Gautier’s “Étude de mains: Lacenaire” are two such examples. The self-proclaimed anti-feminist writer...

"Is he a licentious lewd Sort of a Person?" Constructing the child rapist in early modern England.

When in April 1747 judge presiding over trial of John Hunter for rape of Grace Pitts, aged ten, at Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, asked a witness called testify Hunter's character and reputation, Is he a licentious Sort of a Person? he clearly had in mind that a particular kind of man was likely be guilty of rape of a child. Such a man would have demonstrated through his behavior that he was likely behave in a sexually immoral and immodest fashion--but not necessarily that he would direct his attentions primarily toward Unlike modern pedophile, who is understood have a primary, if not exclusive, interest in children that he is likely conceal, early modern child rapist was a man whose immorality would be clearly visible as someone who frequented lewd women or who acted in an unseemly fashion with other women. This article investigates how individuals living in early modern England may have understood and thought about behavior of those who engaged in activities with children below age of consent and especially whether they were regarded as having a particular, and abnormal, desire for It examines how such people were characterized and represented in prosecutions of crime involving children in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London and what extent such characterizations and representations conformed later sexological categorizations. It argues that, as suggested by quotation above, such men were thought be a particular sort of a person, but not one whose identity was defined by whom he had sex with. He was, rather, a man who was characterized as generally immoral, lewd, lustful, and loose-living, notable for his debauchery and lack of self-mastery, and therefore inevitably coming a very bad, and untimely, end. Categories of deviation--or perversion--emerged with development of psychiatry and sexology in late nineteenth century, particularly from Richard von Krafft-Ebing's exhaustive cataloging of such behaviors in his Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in German in 1886. Krafft-Ebing did not, in his brief discussion of those who engaged in activities with employ term pedophilia or pedophile describe such individuals but rather referred violation of individuals under age of fourteen. The term paedophilia, defined by Oxford English Dictionary as sexual desire directed towards children, appears have first been used by Havelock Ellis in his Studies in Psychology of Sex in 1906. The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) first used term in 1980 to describe a specific subset of child molesters who displayed particular characteristics. By 1987 DSM definition had been revised define pedophilia as characterized by recurrent intense urges and sexually arousing fantasies involving activity with a prepubescent child or children. One of major narratives in history of sexuality since Foucault has been shift in understandings of behaviors, particularly homosexual, between early modern and modern worlds. Sexual acts that were previously understood as subject religious and legal regulation and that anyone might commit now became understood as integral identities. The rise of sexology and medical categorization of behaviors defined primarily by object choice gave birth the homosexual as well as other types such as pedophile. The early modern period predates these formulations, so it would be anachronistic use term pedophile for those who engaged in activities with It would also be next impossible: there are few diaries, letters, or autobiographies recording thoughts or fantasies, let alone behavior, including with those who today would be under age of consent. Sir Simonds D'Ewes and Samuel Jeake both recorded marriages girls of thirteen and that these marriages were consummated, but these marriages were legally contracted, since age of consent marriage for girls was twelve. There would not have been any contemporary sense that such men harbored abnormal desires. Despite some contemporary concern about... Language: en

“We Cut and Drink Blood When We Have Sex. Do We Have a Problem?”

To the Editor: Paraphilias are a complex and heterogeneous group of disorders in which sexual deviance is regarded as a medical phenomenon.1 We present a case of paraphilia disorder with depressive symptoms and suicidal ideations that was ameliorated with risperidone treatment.

Anaesthetic Bodies and the Absence of Feeling: Pain and Self-Mutilation in Later Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry

This paper addresses the overlapping ways in which self-inflicted injury was understood in relation to an absence of pain during the long nineteenth century, arguing that a clear distinction between bodily and mental suffering cannot be made in this period. The medical view that self-infliction of injury must necessarily be pathological is shown to have emerged from earlier philosophical approaches to pain. This was cemented by the formation of a somatic model of self-mutilation, based on the concept of cutaneous anaesthesia, particularly in the work of Wilhelm Griesinger in Germany. In contrast, the words of asylum patients provide a much broader spectrum of ways in which injuries might have been understood. Nonetheless, the meanings attributed generally emphasize self-mutilation as a response to physical, rather than emotional, pain, indicating the widespread nature of physical aetiologies of insanity. Such a somatic approach also permeated psychological models of self-inflicted injury in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as shown through examination of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s concept of ‘sexual anaesthesia’, William James’s association of anaesthesia with the absence of emotion, and self-mutilation and fixed ideas in the work of Pierre Janet. The study of self-mutilation thus provides an interesting angle from which to explore the complexity of notions of body and mind, in relation to concepts of pain.

Sexual Sadism

The phenomenon of sexual sadism was first scientifically described by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in 1999 as a sexual preference disorder that focuses on the infliction of suffering, pain, or humiliation to achieve sexual gratification. The present article reviews the historical development of the term sexual sadism, including the current descriptive nosology of psychiatric classification. Despite clear definitions that specify the sexual objects, duration, and distress necessary for a disorder, evidence for the diagnostic reliability for sexual sadism in the forensic domain is mixed. We argue that the reliance on the patient's willingness to divulge corresponding violent sexual fantasies is the Achilles' heel of the diagnosis. In an attempt to improve agreement across diagnosticians, we argue for the use of behavioral indicators. We summarize the extant research on the Severe Sexual Sadism Scale (SESAS), which is a file-based observer rating of pertinent crime-scene actions. We conclude that the analysis of crime-scene behavior, as achieved with the SESAS, can provide a useful complement for the clinical diagnosis in forensic psychiatry and psychology.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing's views on the etiology of major psychiatric illness

While best known in the anglophonic world for his work on sexual deviations and his advocacy for degeneration theory, Richard Krafft-Ebing (RKE) (1840-1902) was a major figure in late-19th century European psychiatry and author of the most widely read German psychiatric textbook of that era. With the goal of (re-)introducing his work to an anglophonic audience, we review and provide an historical context for RKE's etiologic theory of major psychiatric illness. RKE saw psychiatric disorders as multifactorial, arising from two sets of etiologic factors: predisposing and exciting. Exciting causes were either psychological or physical, while predisposing causes were either general (e.g. sex, occupation, age) or individual-specific. Three major individual-specific risk factors were of particular importance: heredity, personality and education/rearing. Hereditary factors were typically the most important but were usually non-specific in their effect with the forms of psychiatric illness often differing in close relatives. He emphasized the importance of the 'neuropathic personality,' which rendered affected individuals sensitive to the pathogenic effects of various exciting influences. Poor rearing could also substantially increase risk for major mental illness. RKE saw the influences of hereditary and rearing factors on psychiatric illness as often mediated through a neuropathic personality. While RKE believed in degeneration theory and emphasized the potential etiologic importance of masturbation in psychiatric illness, his clinical writings were otherwise characterized by a broad-minded and sensible approach that lacked the narrowness of the strongly brain-based or psychoanalytic psychiatric schools which were very influential during and shortly after his life.

Sexual Modernity in the Works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll

The modern notion of sexuality took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll. This modernisation of sexuality was closely linked to the recognition of sexual diversity, as it was articulated in the medical–psychiatric understanding of what, at that time, was labelled as perversion. From around 1870, psychiatrists shifted the focus from immoral acts, a temporary deviation of the norm, to an innate morbid condition. In the late nineteenth century, several psychiatrists, collecting and publishing more and more case histories, classified and explained the wide range of deviant sexual behaviours they traced. The emergence of medical sexology meant that perversions could be diagnosed and discussed. Against this background both Krafft-Ebing and Moll articulated a new perspective, not only on perversion, but also on sexuality in general. Krafft-Ebing initiated and Moll elaborated a shift from a psychiatric perspective in which deviant sexuality was explained as a derived, episodic and more or less singular symptom of a more fundamental mental disorder, to a consideration of perversion as an integral part of a more general, autonomous and continuous sexual instinct. Before Sigmund Freud and others had expressed similar views, it was primarily through the writings of Krafft-Ebing and Moll that a new understanding of human sexuality emerged.

Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture Vaheed Ramazani Evans, David, and Kate Griffiths, eds. Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture. New York: Rodopi, 2008. Pp. 286. ISBN: 978-90-420-2502-8 This volume brings together revised versions of essays presented at a conference sponsored by the University of Edinburgh's Department of French. The essays span "the long nineteenth century," which, the editors note, begins with Sade and ends with Freud. In Part 1, entitled "The Novel," Henri Mitterand discusses the inseparability of pleasure and pain in nineteenth-century prose and aesthetics; Michael Tilby studies the language of intoxication in Balzac's Comédie humaine; and Franceso Manzini reads pain in Balzac's L'Envers de l'histoire contemporaine as the means by which the Romantic generation expiates the sins of its forebears. The second part, "Crime and Punishment," opens with Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini's exploration of how the writings of the famous murderer Pierre-François Lacenaire, by theorizing and poeticizing his remorseless cruelty, successfully fostered his public image as a Romantic hero. Loïc Guyon focuses on the psychopolitical resonances of the guillotine for a post-Revolutionary generation seeking to work through the guilt and trauma associated with the loss of the Ancien Régime's paternal metaphor, the king as the "head" of the body politic. In the closing chapter of Part 2, Natalia Leclerc shows how, in the (a)moral universe of Barbey d'Aurevilly's Les Diaboliques, the protagonist's will to power generally takes the form of a masochistic jouissance that, by virtue of its aesthetic and metaphysical atemporality, appears to lie beyond the worldly norms of good and evil. Part 3, "Écritures féminines," opens with Anna Norris's study of Marie Cappelle Lafarge, an imprisoned aristocrat who never ceases to proclaim her innocence, and who in her memoirs portrays herself as having been fated since childhood to a lifetime of undeserved suffering and misfortune. Sara James then examines the poetry of Malvina Blanchecotte, an ouvrière-poète whose écriture de la douleur offers an unsentimental representation of the suffering of the working-class woman. In the final chapter of the section, Rachel Mesch places an irresolvable pleasure-pain dialectic at the center of the struggle for sexual self-determination in novels by Anna de Noailles, Lucie Dlarus-Mardrus, and Colette. The penultimate division, "Defining Sexual Experience," details the uses of pleasure and pain in the repressive logic of fin-de-siècle medical discourses. Gretchen Schultz, through an interreading of Catulle Mendès's Méphistophélia and medical treatises by Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Julien Chevalier, reveals the extent to which fictional and scientific texts tend to echo one another in representing the wages of female homosexuality. The two remaining chapters of Part 4 deal with the medical normalization of female desire in the context of newly developed classifications such as frigidity, which is the focus of the essay by Alison Moore, and hysteria and spermattorhoea, which are analyzed by Elizabeth Stephens. In the fifth and final part, "Aesthetics, Beauty, and the Visual Arts," Rae Beth Gordon demonstrates how beauty and ugliness were aligned with pleasure and pain in the [End Page 171] evolutionary and psycho-physiological aesthetics of late nineteenth-century scientists and artists. Carol Rifelj argues that whereas fashion manuals required that women go to great pains (literally) to create an image of effortless beauty, literary narratives often implied, conversely, that the ideal woman is most beautiful when her suffering is de-sublimated, and manifest in sartorial disarray. Claire Moran closes the volume with a study of the abstract self-figuration of the artist as Christ in the work of Odilon Redon, James Ensor, and Paul Gaugin. We would be hard put to find a literary or artistic work that does not thematize or in some way textualize feelings of pleasure and pain. So we might expect that the usefulness and originality of a volume proposing to explore nineteenth-century literary and cultural representations of those particular sensations/affects would lie in its theorization and comparative historicization of them per se, that is, its problematization of...

Fiction as Evidence:

It is well known that Freud mined the literary field for representations of what he considered symbolically potent universal and timeless human conflicts. He also modeled some of his most important theoretical constructions on findings from literary texts—the Oedipus complex, narcissism, and his conception of the uncanny are the most obvious examples. What is less frequently discussed, however, is that he also drew significantly on sexological writings by his predecessors in the field, most importantly Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Alfred Binet, Havelock Ellis, and Iwan Bloch.1 Like Freud, these pioneers of the scientific study of sex also make extensive use of literary sources. There is thus an older and more pervasive tradition of resorting to products of the imagination when theorizing the sexual. The ways in which many sexologists use literary sources differ substantially from the then-common practice of spicing up scientific studies with erudite references to classical literature. Not only do the early sexologists adopt terms and concepts from fictional sources, such as sadism and masochism, but literary texts frequently serve as evidence in their works and fictional representations are treated as case studies that are deemed just as valid as empirical observations. Surprisingly, this striking blending of discourses has received little critical attention. Vernon A. Rosario and Heike Bauer are among the few historians of sexuality who have commented

Le syndrome de Tardieu. Maltraitance des enfants, médecine légale et psychiatrie au xixe siècle

This paper deals with the question of child abuse in xixth century, as it is practically and theoretically considered by forensic medicine and psychiatry. Two exemplary cases are first evoked, as related by par François Leuret (1836) and Adolphe Toulmouche (1838). Then is examined in details the founding text by Ambroise Tardieu (1860), devoted to child abuse and mistreatment. Is recalled the development of the abused child theme in the second half of xixth century, and the building of a child protection system, leading to the 1898 french law. It is shown how the anthropological psychiatric theories (Lombroso, Dupré) fail to explain the child abuse phenomenon. On the other hand, the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing are fruitful, although they lead to sexualise the problem. Is briefly evoked the new configuration of the problem in xxth century, with “child abuse and neglect” (CAN). Is finally sketched an assessment of xixth century: success of practical forensic medicalization of child abuse, but failure on the side of psychiatric theories concerning the psychopathology of mistreaters.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks: Exchanges between Scientific and Imaginary Accounts of Sexual Deviance

Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks: Exchanges between Scientific and Imaginary Accounts of Sexual Deviance

Richard von Krafft-Ebing's <em>Psychopathia Sexualis</em> and Thomas Mann's <em>Buddenbrooks</em>: Exchanges between Scientific and Imaginary Accounts of Sexual Deviance

Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia sexualis (1986) belongs to a large body of turn-of-the-century psychological and sexological writing which often mixes fictive and factual narratives of sexual deviance, blurring the boundaries between literature and science and providing ample material for authors of fiction. Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks is a case in point, for it directly reflects Kra.-Ebing's theories on the origins and physical and psychological markers of homosexuality on numerous levels.

<em>The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture</em>, by Diane Mason

Reviewed by: The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture Colette Colligan (bio) The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture, by Diane Mason; pp. viii + 184. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008, £55.00, $79.00. In his 1929 essay "Pornography and Obscenity," D. H. Lawrence wrote that "there is an element of pornography in nearly all nineteenth-century literature" (Late Esssays and Articles [Cambridge, 2004], 243). For Lawrence, pornography was the product of a masturbatory nineteenth-century literary imagination, and Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847) an example of "this furtive, sneaking, cunning rubbing of an inflamed spot in the imagination" (244). I have always been struck by Lawrence's sweeping dismissal of pornography, masturbation, and nineteenth-century literature as the "dirty little secret" of British literary culture. He was obviously being provocative in an era of unofficial but state-sanctioned government censorship, but why was he so negatively fixated on masturbation as the explanation for Britain's literary and cultural ills? Diane Mason's study of masturbation as the subject of a medical and social anxiety that filtered through the nineteenth-century literary imagination helps contextualize Lawrence's musings. Mason maps this discourse of masturbation across a variety of medical writings and novels from the nineteenth century, covering the scientific works of Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and R. V. Pierce, and the literary works of Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker, among others. With the diffusion of professional and popular medical works warning about loss of virility, reproductive inferiority, and degeneration, this period saw the promulgation of anxieties about masturbation. Mason also gives special attention to the overlooked medical literature on female masturbation that linked the practice to nymphomania and prostitution. Her central proposition, however, is that these paranoid medical warnings about masturbation were incorporated in a surprising variety of ways into mainstream and pornographic fiction. Most interestingly, she argues that the symptoms of masturbation (deathly pallor, sweaty palms, and frail health) evolved into a capacious literary trope that could signal different types of social and sexual deviance—from female promiscuity and lesbian desire in J. S. Le Fanu's Carmilla (1871–72) to sodomy and homosexuality in the underground pornographic novel Teleny (1893). Mason's approach emphasizes the medicalized nature of nineteenth-century fiction while also signalling her primary method of literary analysis. This book advances our understanding of the history of sexuality by highlighting the complex connections between nineteenth-century sexology and the canonical and noncanonical fiction of the time. Mason breaks down generic distinctions between clinical and popular medical writing, scientific texts and gothic narratives, and literature and pornography. In a chapter from the edited collection International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000 (2005), Lisa Z. Sigel comments astutely on the interrelationship of pornography and sexology in the nineteenth century and suggests the benefits of opening up both fields to comparative scholarship. While Mason makes a similar interdisciplinary move, showing how "pornography blurs into literature as, indeed, does medicine, whether clinical or popular" (35), she nonetheless over-stabilizes these generic categories by repeatedly reading fiction through medical literature. She misses the opportunity to explore a [End Page 321] body of pseudoscientific studies that doubled both as science and pornography. Charles Carrington's late-nineteenth-century publications The Ethnology of the Sixth Sense (1899) and The Genital Laws (1900) are examples that could have been included in a study examining relationships among medical texts, fiction, and pornography. I am impressed by this book's comparative instincts, smudging of disciplinary lines, and attention to reviled genres such as pornography, but its use of medical texts to interpret literature symptomatically represents a methodological limitation. While it examines the discourse of masturbation across a range of nineteenth-century texts, Mason's book does not address the problem of historical and geographical variation. She demonstrates the wide variety of ways in which the masturbation trope was deployed in novels like Our Mutual Friend (1865), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), and Dracula (1897), yet this attention to literary variation is set against a monolithic account of anti-masturbation panic. Most of the clinical and popular medical writing...

Csók István: Báthory Erzsébet (1895). Egy „mestermű” fogadtatása és utóélete

Csók István: Báthory Erzsébet (1895). Egy „mestermű” fogadtatása és utóélete

Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (review)

Reviewed by: Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness Howard I. Kushner Mark S. Micale . Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. xv + 366 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-0-674-03166-1). Beginning with his Ph.D. dissertation more than two decades ago, and a series of articles and book chapters since, Mark Micale has explored the history of male hysteria as a medical diagnosis in the nineteenth century. This book brings these writings together and places them in wider historical context. Micale begins in the seventeenth century and follows the recognition and periodic repression of male hysteria through early twentieth-century psychoanalysis. His portrait of Freud's "brilliant" and ambivalent decades-long encounter with male hysteria is emblematic of the larger story Micale tells, as it demonstrates "how productive the study of the subject could be" and "how very difficult it would be for any male scientist of this era [or earlier] to transcend the inherited categories of masculinity and femininity" (p. 275). Micale's is not a story of progress but rather of a continuing struggle of physicians "to break out of the historical 'prison of gender'" (p. 275). Thus he examines the persistence of the seventeenth-century debate over the connection between female-gendered hysteria and the male-gendered diagnosis of hypochondria. Examining the writings of Thomas Willis and Thomas Sydenham, Micale uncovers fissures in the categorical borders that enabled others, including eighteenth-century [End Page 785] British novelists, to view emotionality in men as appropriate expressions of a new sensibility that challenged earlier notions of appropriate gendered responses. Despite the more frequent diagnosis of female hysteria, Micale insists that "seventeenth-and eighteenth-century English and Scottish medical literature," including the writings of Robert Burton and Samuel Johnson, "can be viewed as a sort of pre-psychiatric discourse on male hysteria" (pp. 46–47). This opening was, according to Micale, eclipsed as "a great wave of amnesia regarding the nervous disorders descended on European medicine around 1800" (p. 49). During this period, "medical science and practice were aggressively pressed into the service of . . . maintaining a regime of difference between the sexes," thus excluding behaviors such as hysteria from being ascribed to men (p. 49). Of course, there were a few dissenting voices, like that of the French physician Étienne-Jean Georget in the 1820s, but these were drowned out by a much wider consensus that insisted on strict gender boundaries between the sexes. It was left to the great French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in the 1870s to establish male hysteria as a legitimate diagnosis. Unlike his predecessors, "Charcot had genuinely come to believe that men and children were susceptible to the same nervous disorders as women" (p. 124). In "propounding a theory of hysteria in the male," writes Micale, "Charcot was also attempting to undermine a theoretical model of the disorder that had led to some of the most deplorable therapeutic practices of his day" (p. 128). Nevertheless, as Micale shows, despite his eagerness to identify male hysteria, Charcot continued to ascribe traditional gendered attributes to the distressed, including assumptions about the "otherness" of male hysterics as inheritors of degenerative constitutions. In the decades following Charcot, a group of turn-of-the-century physicians and scientists, including Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Otto Weininger, "challenged traditional assumptions about male and female sexuality and gender identity, but," Micale finds, their theories were "also laden with internal anxieties and inconsistencies" that "simultaneously sustained and subverted the socio-sexual regime of the day" (p. 179). Thus, despite many findings that hysteria was more frequent in men than in women (p. 183), Micale notes that "on closer inspection, the medical discourse of male hysteria during the 1880s and 1890s repeatedly exhibits a set of rhetorical and interpretive strategies of resistance" (p. 193). These strategies continued to ascribe male hysteria to so-called inferior classes of patients, those who, for one reason or other, failed the test of "true" masculinity: "Thus, despite Charcot's innovative work, the male victim of hysteria in the . . . French medical imagination was still frequently envisioned as an effeminate heterosexual or a physical or emotional hermaphrodite...

Angus McLaren, Impotence: a cultural history, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. xvii, 332, £19.00, $30.00 (hardback 978-0-226-50076-8).

Angus McLaren, Impotence: a cultural history, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. xvii, 332, £19.00, $30.00 (hardback 978-0-226-50076-8).

Sex on the brain: The rise and fall of German sexual science

Throughout the nineteenth century, German medical, scientific and legal scholars found themselves puzzled and engaged by the diverse forms of human sexuality. Psychiatrists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing who were interested in explaining deviance encountered scientifically trained advocates for emancipation like Magnus Hirschfeld, and the result was the new--if unstable--discipline of sexual science. Because they based arguments for social intervention on knowledge of nature and the body, the field's proponents--like the advocates of eugenics and racial hygiene--argued that they were biologists. After 1900, this mutual biological engagement of sexual science and eugenics revealed itself in overlapping debates between the proponents of both fields.

Shades of Melancholy in Gabriele Reuter's Aus guter Familie1

Gabriele Reuter (1859-1941) published over thirty works of prose fiction between the years of 1888 and 1937, many of which were acclaimed as novels by her readers and reviewers.2 Moreover, although Reuter insisted in her autobiography that she was no fan of psychoanalysis,3 Sigmund Freud asserted that her best-selling novel of 1895, Aus guter Familie,4 offered unique insight into the origins of neuroses.5 Such contemporary opinions attest to Reuter's overall talents as writer, keen observer of human nature, and critic of the middle class in Wilhelminian Germany. Yet Freud was right to single out Aus guter Familie for its psychological insights. According to its subtitle, the novel recounts the Leidensgeschichte eines Madchens, the tale of the suffering and sorrows of an unmarried girl, Agathe Heidling, whose teenage fantasies and artistic sensibility give way in young adulthood to a series of psychosomatic illnesses and breakdowns. These afflictions result in two years in various nerve clinics, and ultimately, in Agathe's loss of her memory, her sense of individuality, and her desires. When addressing Agathe's medical and psychological condition, secondary literature has generally offered the diagnosis of hysteria,6 and it is indisputable that Agathe represses her sexual desire and displays the physicalization of emotion typical of hysterics. Yet the focus on hysteria provides neither a sufficient account of Agathe's persistent sadness and feelings of guilt, nor an adequate explanation for the symbolic meaning attached to her mood states and for her drastic decline at the end of the novel. These aspects are better understood when viewed through the lens of melancholy, a term whose referent over the centuries has ranged from a mood state, to a temperament, to an illness or mood disorder. As a mood state, melancholy's main characteristics include temporary sadness, heavy spirits, and pensive reflection or contemplation. The melancholic temperament, in contrast, refers to a general disposition towards melancholy that, at various times, has been positively associated with artistic creativity.7 Lastly, in the case of the illness, often called melancholia, melancholic features become debilitating and are attributed to somatic or psychodynamic causes.8 Building on prior investigations into Reuter's work, this article illustrates how notions of melancholy as a temperament and as an illness are at work in the novel's attempt to account for and give meaning to Agathe Heidling's mood states. If one reads the novel as an illness narrative, the depictions of Agathe's sadness and final breakdown closely parallel descriptions of the functional illness melancholia as described by Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Emanuel Mendel in the final quarter of the 19th century. At the same time, the novel tentatively inserts Agathe into the affirmative tradition of the male artist whose melancholic temperament allows him to see more clearly than others. Finally, in its search for explanations for Agathe's inability to develop her talents, Aus guter Familie anticipates Freud's essay, Trauer und Melancholie (1915-1917), which posits the conscience and feelings of loss as the psychodynamic causes of melancholia. Naomi Schor has argued that different forms of melancholy constantly intertwine, and cannot, should not be separated (3). By engaging with the multiple, often-conflicting meanings of melancholy in circulation around 1900, Aus guter Familie explores both the redemptive and the pathological aspects of sadness and loss as experienced by middle-class women in Wilhelminian Germany. In so doing, the novel engages with contemporary scientific discourses without accepting their implied determinism, and it posits the potential for women's artistic sensibility and talent while investigating those factors that stand in the way of their development. As readers familiar with Reuter's works know, she drew many of her psychological insights from her own life. …

T06-O-05 Sexuality and affective relationships in the pyromaniac

Classic literature has already given prominence to the association between sexuality and pyromania. Freud placed the last one among the disorders related to the anal phase; Jung projected it in a more collective prospective, explainable through the symbolism of the fire; Krafft Ebing provided a multidisciplinary vision linked to the genetic, psychosexual, and forensic aspect, finally Fenichel makes a distinction between the neurotic subject, forced to perform unpleasant actions to lessen anguish, and the perverted one, who performs, usually, pleasant actions dictated by an instinct. Objectives The Author wants to recall the specialists’attention with the aim to try a clearer definition of the phenomenon, to distinguish it from vandalism and incendiary acts and, mainly, to define a clinic of the treatment to more adequately answer to the pyromaniac patient. Results From studies on pyromania and treated clinical cases, the Author noticed the pyromaniac's incapacity to live a healthy sexual life, as well as healthy affective relationships. He tends to avoid the coitus to avoid confrontation with his incapacity and psychological impotence, this leave him with a frustration feeling that brings him to accumulate desire (tension) that leads to an acting-out. Conclusions The Author found out a lack in the present day literature and, therefore, concludes that, nowadays, the attention related the specific theme is exclusively sectoral, while he believes it is worth examining thoroughly, using an integrated approach.