|
|
Krafft-Ebing
Diagnoses Degenerates
|
Vienna, 1886. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902),
an influential German Professor of Psychiatry, published the first
book that claimed to be
a scientific classification of sexual aberrations in
1886. Terms like fetishism, masochism, sadism, sexual psychopath and a host of
others that never caught on |
|
appeared for the first time in his Psychopathia Sexualis
with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic
Study. According to Krafft-Ebing, homosexuality, the sexual aberration that
most concerned him, can be caused by masturbation or debauchery, but degenerate
heredity is the most common origin of the disease. Though he disagreed with
Karl Ulrichs about the roots of
homosexuality - Ulrichs |
Richard von
Krafft-Ebing
photo credits |
|
believed
that it is a normal variation, not
a disorder - Krafft-Ebing borrowed heavily from his
Urning theory. Just like Ulrichs, Krafft-Ebing wrote that inborn
same-sex desire comes from a feminine tendency in a man, or a masculine tendency in a
woman. |
At first glance, Krafft-Ebing's thesis that homosexuals are degenerates
makes him look like a malevolent doctor intent on exterminating homosexuals, but he
wasn't. Though police and legislators have sometimes used his book to justify the
persecution of homosexuals, Krafft-Ebing was a legal liberal who wrote favorably of the
French legal tradition which did not penalize same-sex eroticism. He believed that
paragraph 175
and laws like it are unjust because homosexuals are diseased degenerates, not criminals.
Diagnosing Mental Disease
Psychopathia Sexualis was Krafft-Ebing's second major book.
His first, A Textbook of Insanity, was published in 1879 and contained an
elaborate system for categorizing mental diseases that earned him a reputation as a
masterful classifier. Krafft-Ebing's classification mania didn't come from personal
idiosyncracy, but from an effort to improve the state of the young field of
psychiatry. In the 1870s when the Textbook was published, alienists, as
asylum keepers were called, were considered little more than wardens at jails for the
insane and they yearned for the respect accorded other physicians. Yet, their
practice bore no resemblance to the practice of medicine.
The first step in treatment in any medical field from bone-setting to
boil-lancing is diagnosis, but alienists lacked even rudimentary standards for classifying
mental illnesses. How could alienists claim to be practicing medicine when they
couldn't even diagnose their patients? Krafft-Ebing, an alienist himself, wrote the Textbook
to solve the problem, and alienists welcomed it and others like it because they
needed diagnostic tools so badly.
Psychopathia Sexualis was a continuation of Krafft-Ebing's
earlier work, but now applied to disorders of the sexual "instinct." The
book uses the same method, and suffers from the same problems, as its predecessor.
Krafft-Ebing was writing taxonomies of mental and sexual disorders before any overall
theory of mental illness existed and instead of developing a theory to unify his
classifications, he borrowed from others and tried to piece together a coherent system.
The resulting amalgamations of contradictory theories in his Textbook and
in Psychopathia Sexualis barely held together.
The Nature of the "Antipathic
Sexual Instinct"
Krafft-Ebing's analysis of the "anti-pathic sexual instinct,"
erotic feelings of a man toward other men, illustrates his lack of originality.
Every one of the three categories of homosexual he developed comes from someone else:
Psychosexual Hermaphroditism. Men suffering this
disorder are attracted to both women and men. Through treatment like hypnosis,
electric stimulation, and the avoidance of masturbation, some can be cured of their
homosexual desires. The cause is probably degenerate heredity, an idea Krafft-Ebing
appropriated from Morel.
Congenital Inversion. Krafft-Ebing combined
Ulrichs' Urning theory with Morel's
degeneration to come up with this diagnosis. Male congenital inverts are aware of
their sexual anomaly from their childhood on because they suffer from degenerate heredity.
Some inverts exhibit varying degrees of effeminacy, from Effemination in which a
man has a distinctly feminine mien to Androgyny in which a man is so effeminate that he
can even has feminine bodily characteristics like rounded hips. Since most who
suffer congenital anti-pathic instinct feel that their inclinations are natural,
treatment is unlikely to be effective.
Acquired Anti-Pathic Sexual Instinct comes in two primary
forms. First, some inverts with degenerate heredity do not become aware of their
perverted feelings until after puberty, usually because of masturbation.
Tissot had taught that masturbation can cause pederasty, and
Krafft-Ebing repeated that popular view here.
Another group who acquire homosexual practices are debauchees who exhaust
the pleasures women can provide, then turn to men and boys for new sexual thrills.
Krafft-Ebing diagnosed these men as "cultivated pederasts", and repeated the
traditional Christian condemnation of unrestrained lust that dates at least to St. Peter
Damian's Book of Gomorrah, circa 1050 A. D.
Krafft-Ebing's book suffered criticism from two camps. Some doctors
thought homosexuality was best ignored and that discussions of it were inevitably
pornographic. To placate them, Krafft-Ebing substituted scholarly Latin for
vernacular German when describing sex acts to protect non-professional readers from
titillation. Other critics complained that Psychopathia Sexualis was
disorganized and confusing because it lacked an underlying theory to account for the
phenomena it categorized, but Krafft-Ebing was either deaf to this criticism or incapable
of responding to it. Successive versions of the book became more, not less, confused
in their theoretical stance.
Perversion, Perversity, and the Law
Doctors were the primary audience Krafft-Ebing intended for Psychopathia
Sexualis, but he included a long section on the legal implications of his
"scientific" "medico-forensic" findings. Lawyers and judges had
no more respect for alienists than anyone else, and Krafft-Ebing aimed to change that when
he wrote that lawyer needed psychiatric help to fairly sentence criminals. "Law
and Jurisprudence have thus far given but little attention to the facts resulting from
investigations in psycho-pathology," he complained. "Law is, in this,
opposed to Medicine, and is constantly in danger of passing judgment on individuals who,
in the light of science, are not responsible for their acts."
According to Krafft-Ebing, judges make a terrible mistake when they
sentence offenders based on their acts rather than the reasons behind their acts. In
fact, judges need help from psychiatrists to distinguish between two types of offenders,
the perverse and the perverts. Cultivated pederasts and others who commit abnormal
sexual acts out of lust for sexual thrills or to earn money as prostitutes are, in
Krafft-Ebing's terms, perverse. They act against their normal heterosexual natures
and deserve punishment from the courts. Perverts like congenital homosexuals
constitute a second class of offenders who commit abnormal acts that accord with their own
natures. They cannot help themselves because their degenerate heredity has
programmed them differently from normal people. Krafft-Ebing argued that these sick
men deserve pity, not punishment.
Armed with the distinction between wicked perversity and sick perversion,
Krafft-Ebing launched a powerful attack on Paragraph 175 and other
laws that criminalize sex between men. He reasoned that even though the perverse
deserve punishment, perverts don't. When a man is charged with a violation of ¶ 175, he argued, his reputation is ruined even if he isn't
convicted, so the law unfairly destroys the lives of congenital perverts.
Medicalization and a New Minority
Psychopathia Sexualis is a derivative, disorganized, and
sometimes self-contradictory book, but it was the only book of its kind at the end of the
1800s. It was widely read and translated and an 1892 English edition spread the word
to England and the U. S. By the time Krafft-Ebing died in 1902, the book had reached
twelve editions, and its English version was reprinted at least until 1965. Terms
like sadism, masochism, fetishism, necrophilia, homosexuality and heterosexuality were
introduced into the international psychiatric lexicon for the first time.
Though Krafft-Ebing made a lasting contribution by spreading a vocabulary
of perversion, the theory of degeneration he espoused fell on hard times at the turn of
the 20th Century. Havelock Ellis rejected it in his Sexual Inversion of
1897, and in 1905 Freud published a withering criticism of the idea that amounted to its
death knell. The year before he died, Krafft-Ebing even recanted himself. In a
1901 article in the Jahrbuch für Sexualzwischenstufen,
a journal published by the Scientific
Humanitarian Committee he declared that even though inversion is an inherited variation, it is not morbid or
degenerate. Unfortunately, the last edition of his book
predated his conversion, and its frequent reprints contain the old model of degeneration.
The book and others of its ilk had another
consequence: they formalized and popularized the idea that homosexuals are
constitutionally different from heterosexuals, that their minds and sometimes even their
bodies set them apart from the heterosexual majority. Ulrichs was the first to
articulate this idea in print, but psychiatrists learned about it from Krafft-Ebing.
The idea was popular among psychiatrists and homosexuals, but for different
reasons.
Many homosexuals, including many in the case
studies Krafft-Ebing used to illustrate his book, welcomed the idea that they possessed a
unique personality structure. It seemed better to be considered sick than depraved
and subject to prosecution under the law. Psychiatrists liked the idea, too, because
it gave them a position of power as experts in the treatment of sexual pathologies.
The older sin model didn't pay for anybody, so the new medical model quickly caught on.
Credits, Notes, and Further Reading
Photo Credits
"Richard von Krafft-Ebing" is
reproduced courtesy of the Archiv und Bibliothek des Schwulen Museums. Berlin.
The photo originally appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld, 1930, Geschlechtskunde auf
Grunddreissingjährur Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeit, Stuttgart: Julius
Püttman, Verlagsbuchhandlung.
Notes
The Nature of the Anti-Pathic Sexual Instinct
Krafft-Ebing's typology of sexual pathologies is
complex and contradictory. The description of his system here is more carefully
organized than in Psychopathia Sexualis and, in the interest of conciseness,
glosses over some contradictions in the original text.
Perversion, Perversity and the Law.
Krafft-Ebing's complaints about the Law's lack
of respect for psychiatry is from Krafft-Ebing, 1928, p. 500.
Medicalization and a New Minority
The great philosopher of medicalization is
Michel Foucault (see Foucault, 1976), but his book was written before the role of Karl
Ulrichs or the existence of effeminate urban subcultures had been documented well.
Ulrichs articulated the idea of an Urning personality and
constitution in the 1860s, well before physicians Karl Westphal or Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and
the idea that sodomites have uniquely effeminate personalities was widespread in urban
subcultures dating from at least 1700 in London,
Paris,
and Amsterdam.
Krafft-Ebing's repudiation of degeneration in
the Jahrbuch is cited in Ellis, 1919, p. 312.
Sources and Further Reading
No biography of Krafft-Ebing exists in English,
but snippets of his life are reported in Bullough, 1994 and in Brecher, 1969. The
introduction to Krafft-Ebing, 1904, briefly discusses his work and his commitment to
psychiatry and his patients.
Katz, 1995, is much easier to read than the
often abstruse Foucault, and eloquently introduces many of the latter's ideas.
Bullough, Vern, 1994. Science in the Bedroom: A History of
Sex Research. New York: Basic Books.
Brecher, Edward, 1969. The Sex Researchers. Boston:
Little, Brown and Co.
Ellis, Albert and Albert Abarbanel, eds., 1961. Encyclopedia of Sexual
Behavior. New York: Hawthorn Books.
Ellis, Havelock, 1897. Sexual Inversion. London:
Wilson and Macmillan. Reprinted by Ayer Press, 1994.
Ellis, Havelock, 1919. Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume
II: Sexual Inversion. Third Edition. Philadelphia: F. A.
Davis.
Foucault, Michel, 1978, Robert Hurley, trans., The History of
Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon.
Freud, Sigmund, 1905. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in
James Strachey, ed. and trans., 1995, The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press.
Katz, Jonathan Ned, 1995. The Invention of Heterosexuality.
New York: Plume.
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 1905. Textbook of Insanity Based on
Clinical Observations, For Practitioners and Students of Medicine. Philadelphia:
F. A. Davis.
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 1928. Psychopathia Sexualis with
Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study,
Revised Edition. Philadelphia: Physicians and Surgeons.
Shorter, Edward, 1997. A History of Psychiatry: From the
Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Storr, Merl, 1998. "Transformations: Subjects, Categories
and Cures in Krafft-Ebing's Sexology" in Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, 1998. Sexology
in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
|
|
 |
© 1999
Andrew Wikholm
All Rights Reserved |
|