Richard von Krafft-Ebing

Richard von Krafft-Ebing

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Richard von Krafft-Ebing

Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing^[1] (August 14 1840 ? December 22 1902) was an Austro-German sexologist and psychiatrist. He wrote Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), a famous series of cases studies of sexual perversity. The book remains well known for his coinage of the term masochism from the name of a contemporary writer, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose partly autobiographical novel Venus in Furs tells of the protagonist's desire to be whipped and enslaved by a beautiful woman.

Baron von Krafft-Ebing was born in Mannheim, Baden, Germany. He was educated in Heidelberg and studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg.

After Krafft-Ebing graduated in medicine and finished his specialization in psychiatry, he worked in several asylums, but he soon was disappointed by their workings and he decided to become an educator. He became a professor at Strasbourg, Graz, and Vienna, and a forensic expert at the Austro-Hungarian capital. He popularized psychiatry, giving public lectures on the subject and theatrical demonstrations of the power of hypnotism.

Psychopathia Sexualis
Trivia about Psychopathia Sexualis
References
Works
Literature
See also
External links

Psychopathia Sexualis

Krafft-Ebing wrote and published several articles on psychiatry, but his book Psychopathia Sexualis (Latin for Psychopathies of Sexuality) became his best-known work. He intended it as a forensic reference for doctors and judges, and used in it a high academic tone, noting in the introduction that he had "deliberately chosen a scientific term for the name of the book to discourage lay readers". He also wrote "sections of the book in Latin for the same purpose". Despite this, the book was highly popular with lay readers and was printed and translated many times.

In the first edition of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), Krafft-Ebing divided "cerebral neuroses" into four categories:

paradoxia: Sexual desire at the wrong time of life, i.e. childhood or old age
anesthesia: Insufficient sexual desire
hyperesthesia: Excessive sexual desire
paraesthesia: Sexual desire for the wrong goal or object, including homosexuality ("contrary sexual desire"), sexual fetishism, sadism, masochism, pedophilia, etc.

Krafft-Ebing believed that the purpose of sexual desire was procreation, and that any form of desire that didn't go towards that ultimate goal was a perversion. Rape, for instance, was an aberrant act, but not a perversion, because pregnancy could result.

He saw women as basically sexually passive, and recorded no female sadists or fetishists in his case studies. Behaviour that would be classified as masochism in men was categorized in women as "sexual bondage", which, because it did not interfere with procreation, was not a perversion.

Krafft-Ebing's brief studies of female-bodied individuals included the case of Count-Sandor, a female-to-male transsexual. He theororized that Sandor's somewhat masculine appearance might support a genetic cause for transsexuality. Ebbing included the following information in his study of Sandor:

She was 153 centimeters tall, of delicate build, thin but remarkably muscular on the breast and thighs. Her gait in female attire was awkward ... The hips did not correspond in any way with those of a female, waist wanting, the skull slightly oxcephalic, and in all measurements below average ... Circumference of the head 52 centimeters ... Pelvis generally narrowed (dwarf pelvis), and of decidedly masculine type ... labia majora having a cock's-comb like form and projecting under the labia majora ... On account of narrowness of pelvis, the direction of the thighs not convergent, as in a woman, but straight

(Mackenzie 36.)

After interviewing many homosexuals, both as their private doctors and as a forensic expert, and after reading some works in favour of gay rights (male homosexuality had become a criminal offence in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire by that time; discrimination against lesbians, while not codified, functioned equally), Krafft-Ebing reached the conclusion, contrary to persistent popular belief, that homosexuals did not suffer from mental illness or perversion.

Krafft-Ebing elaborated an evolutionist theory considering homosexuality an anomalous process originating during the gestation of the embryo and fetus, evolving into a sexual inversion of the brain. In 1901, in an article in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, he changed the term anomaly to differentiation. But his final conclusions remained forgotten for years, partly because Sigmund Freud's theories captivated the attention of those who considered homosexuality a psychological problem (most persons 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 and by denying the perversity of homosexuality.

Some years later, Krafft-Ebing's theory led other specialists on mental studies to the same conclusion and to the study of transgenderism (or transsexuality) as another differentiation correctable by surgery (rather than by psychiatry or psychology).

Most contemporary psychiatrists no longer consider homosexual practices pathological (as Krafft-Ebing did in his first studies): this is partly because of new conceptions and partly because of Krafft-Ebing's own self-revision.

Trivia about Psychopathia Sexualis

The book reached 12 editions in his lifetime.
In its second printing, parts were written in Latin, because of lay persons' demand for the book for presumably less than academic purposes. Some publishers translated those passages back into other languages.
It was one of the first books to study, in a "painstaking" manner, such sexual topics as the importance of clitoral orgasm and female sexual pleasure, consideration of the mental states of sexual offenders in judging their actions, and homosexuality.
For decades it was an authority on sexual aberrance, and arguably one of the most influential books on human sexuality before Freud's works.
The author was both praised for opening up a new area of much-needed psychological study and condemned for immorality and justifying perversion.
The book was sold in underground sex shops.

References

Works

Baron von Krafft-Ebing wrote numerous books. Some of them:

Die Melancholie: Eine klinische Studie (1874)
Grundzüge der Kriminalpsychologie für Juristen (second edition, 1882)
Die progressive allgemeine Paralyse (1894)
Nervosität und neurasthenische Zustände (1895)

Craddock translated four of the books into English:

An Experimental Study in the Domain of Hypnotism (New York and London, 1889)
Psychosis Menstrualis (1902)
Psychopathia Sexualis (twelfth edition, 1903)
Text Book of Insanity (1905)

Literature

Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), reprinted by Bloat Books, 1999; ISBN 0-9650324-1-8
Oosterhuis, Harry. Stepchildren of Nature (2000), University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-63059-5
Mackenzie. Transgender Nation (1994), Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Jörg Hutter. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in Homosexualität. Handbuch der Theorie- und Forschungsgeschichte (Editor Rüdiger Lautmann), Campus Verlag, Frankfurt and New York 1993. Pages 48?54.