Krafft-Ebing, Richard 1840–1902

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Krafft-Ebing, Richard
1840–1902

Richard Freiherr (Baron) von Krafft-Ebing was one of the great modern sexologists, and is remembered for his exhaustive catalogue of modern sexual desires and practices, the landmark Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in German in 1886. Krafft-Ebing was born August 14, 1840, in Mannheim, Baden, Germany, to a family from the minor nobility. His grandfather encouraged him to study medicine, which he did, attending the University of Heidelberg and specializing in psychiatry. He then worked as an alienist, or psychiatric doctor, in various insane asylums, before becoming a professor. He taught first at Strasbourg, at that time only recently acquired by Germany, then later at Graz, in the Austro-Hungarian empire, and then in Vienna. In those days alienists were wardens without a proper medical procedure for classifying and treating the insane, so Krafft-Ebing provided a system for categorizing and classifying mental disorders in his first major work, A Textbook of Insanity, published in 1879. He continued his system of classification in his second major work, Psychopathia Sexualis.

Psychiatric interest in sexual deviance in the mid-nineteenth century was part of a larger interest in criminal behavior, including the psychological makeup of criminals. Psychiatrists stressed the need to look at underlying mental illness as well as criminal behavior in treating offenders, and more specifically, at the relationship between sex and psychology. In Psychopathis Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing introduced four categories of sexual abnormality. The first, "paradoxia," described sexual desire at the wrong time of life, such as infancy or old age; the second, "anaesthesia," referred to lack of sexual desire; the third, "hyperesthesia," to excessive desire, and the last "paresthesia," to the "wrong" object or aim of sexual behavior, also known as "perversion." It is for cataloging this last group of so-called abnormalities that Psychopathia Sexualis and its author are best remembered in the early twenty-first century.

Most of Psychopathis Sexualis is concerned with sexual perversion, or "the perversions." Perversion is an old-fashioned diagnostic term that once served as a label for sexual activities considered outside the norm of heterosexual sexual desire and activity. Sexual perversion was defined as any type of sexual activity, regardless of the sex of the participants, other than heterosexual coitus. Psychopathia Sexualis defines sexual perversion as a disease of the sexual instinct, as opposed to sexual perversity, which is defined as vice rather than pathology. The sexual perversions delineated by Krafft-Ebing included sadism, masochism, fetishism, bestiality, sexual inversion in men and women (understood either as what is now termed homosexuality, on the one hand, or gender dysphoria, on the other, or both), rape, nymphomania, onanism (masturbation), pedophilia, exhibitionism, necrophilia, and incest.

Krafft-Ebing spent a major portion of Psychopathia Sexualis discussing homosexuality, primarily in men. He developed three categories of homosexual: Psychosexual Hermaphroditism, Congenital Inversion, and Acquired Anti-Pathic Sexual Instinct.

He theorized that some men with degenerate heredity suffer from Psychosexual Hermaphroditism, which makes them attracted to both women and men. He believed that hypnosis, electricity, and the avoidance of masturbation could be used to cure psychosexual hermaphrodites of their homosexual desires. He also thought that patients with Congenital Inversion suffered from degenerate heredity, but concluded that since most congenital inverts felt that their inclinations were natural, treatment was unlikely to be effective. He classified two types of Acquired Anti-Pathic Sexual Instinct, the first as an acquired awareness of perverse feelings brought on by excessive masturbation; the second resulting from overindulgence in heterosexual activity, where bored men then turn to men and boys for new sexual thrills. Krafft-Ebing diagnosed these men as "cultivated pederasts," and sternly condemned their unrestrained lust.

Krafft-Ebing's book was criticized by doctors who thought homosexuality was pornographic and best ignored, so to mollify them, Krafft-Ebing described sex acts in Latin. This also had the effect of discouraging non-medical readers from accidentally learning something new. This practice of Latin encoding continued in editions of Psychopathia Sexualis until well into the middle of the twentieth century, and many of these copies can still be found. Other critics complained that the booked lacked an underlying theory to account for the practices and desires it classified. This lack of a grand theory may be one reason why the book lasted so long as a scholarly resource; its classifications do not require that one buy into one school of psychiatric medicine or another, and the book functions equally well as a work of cultural history.

Krafft-Ebing's work helped transform society's view of sexual deviants from criminals needing punishment into patients needing treatment. To do this, he distinguished between the perverse and the pervert. Those who commit "abnormal" sex acts for thrills or money are, in Krafft-Ebing's terms, perverse, and deserve punishment because they act against their normal heterosexual natures. Perverts like congenital homosexuals, on the other hand, are acting in accordance with their natures, and cannot help themselves without medical treatment. Krafft-Ebing thought that these people were sick and deserved treatment, not punishment. Later in life he revised many of his prejudices about homosexuals, eventually coming to believe that homosexuality should be decriminalized.

Despite the Latin phrases in many editions of Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing's work helped incite and proliferate the very sexual diversity it sought to classify and control. His categories helped people name themselves and their desires, and served to break down the isolation many of them experienced as homosexuals, fetishists, masochists, and sadists, among others. Krafft-Ebing coined the words masochist and sadist, the first after the author of Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose protagonist wants to be enslaved by a beautiful women; the second for the Marquis de Sade, whose writings celebrated the pleasures of sexual cruelty. Psychopathia Sexualis was the first book to discuss homosexuality scientifically, and one of the first to discuss female sexual pleasure in any depth. Readers contacted him throughout his lifetime, some to seek treatment, others to discuss their particular cases and sexual desires.

Krafft-Ebing retired from teaching at sixty-one, but continued to write and see patients. He died a year later, on December 22, 1902, just three years before the publication of Sigmund Freud's revolutionary Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud's work would radically blur the line between normal and abnormal, heterosexual and homosexual, and healthy and deviant sexuality. Krafft-Ebing, however, laid the groundwork for a greater tolerance of sexual diversity in society at large by taking sexual behavior seriously, lending it the dignity of scientific examination, and separating sexual issues from criminal and moral ones. In the early 2000, he is rightly revered as one of the great nineteenth-century pioneers of sexual science, whose painstaking research helped bring modern, twentieth-century notions of sexual expression into existence.

see also Sexology.