Richard von Krafft-Ebing

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Richard von Krafft-Ebing
Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing with his wife Marie Luise
Born	August 14, 1840 (1840-08-14) Mannheim, Baden, Germany
Died	December 22, 1902 (1902-12-23)
Nationality	Austro-German
Fields	Psychiatry
Alma mater	University of Heidelberg
Known for	Psychopathia Sexualis

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 case studies of sexual perversity. The book remains well known for his coinage of the terms sadism (from the Marquis de Sade) and masochism (from the name of 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 graduating in medicine and finished his specialization in psychiatry, Krafft-Ebing worked in several asylums. He soon grew disappointed with their workings and decided to pursue a more academic vocation. He subsequently 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

Front page of the 1886 work

Krafft-Ebing wrote and published several articles on psychiatry, but his book Psychopathia Sexualis became his best-known work. Krafft-Ebing intended it as a forensic reference for doctors and judges and wrote in 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.

It was one of the first books to study 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 prior to Freud's works. Krafft-Ebing was both praised for opening up a new area of much-needed psychological study and condemned for immorality and justifying perversion.

In the first edition of Psychopathia Sexualis, 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, paedophilia , etc.

Krafft-Ebing believed that the purpose of sexual desire was procreation, and that any form of desire that did not 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 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 females included the case of Count-Sandor, a female-to-male transsexual. He theorized that Sandor's somewhat masculine appearance might support a genetic cause for transsexuality. Ebbing included the following information in his study of Sandor:

After interviewing many homosexuals, both as their private doctor and as a forensic expert, and after reading some works in favour of homosexual rights (male homosexual acts were a criminal offence in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time), 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, 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.^{[citation needed]}

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

References

• Johnson, J (1973), "Psychopathia Sexualis.", The Manchester medical gazette 53 (2): 32–4, 1973 Dec, PMID 4596802 
• Kupferschmidt, H (1987), "[Richard von Krafft-Ebing's "Psychopathia sexualis". Pornography or professional literature?]", Schweiz. Rundsch. Med. Prax. 76 (20): 563–9, 1987 May 12, PMID 3306869 
• Not Available, Not Available (2001), "[Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1903); comments on the cover portrait]", Der Nervenarzt 72 (9): 742, 2001 Sep, doi:10.1007/s001150170056, PMID 11599501 
• Rosario, Vernon A (2002), "Science and sexual identity: an essay review.", Journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences 57 (1): 79–85, 2002 Jan, doi:10.1093/jhmas/57.1.79, PMID 11892515 
• Hertoft, Preben (2002), "[Psychotherapeutic treatment of sexual dysfunction—or from sex therapy to marital therapy]", Ugeskr. Laeg. 164 (41): 4805–8, 2002 Oct 7, PMID 12407889 
• Kennedy, H (2001), "Research and commentaries on Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.", Journal of homosexuality 42 (1): 165–78, doi:10.1300/J082v42n01_09, PMID 11991564 
• Sigusch, V (2004), "[Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902. In memory of the 100th anniversary of his death]", Der Nervenarzt 75 (1): 92–6, 2004 Jan, doi:10.1007/s00115-003-1512-7, PMID 14722666 

Works

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

• Die Melancholie: Eine klinische Studie (1874) OCLC 180728044
• Grundzüge der Kriminalpsychologie für Juristen (second edition, 1882) OCLC 27460358
• Die progressive allgemeine Paralyse (1894) OCLC 65980497
• Nervosität und neurasthenische Zustände (1895) OCLC 9633149

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 0965032418
• Oosterhuis, Harry. Stepchildren of Nature (2000), University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226630595
• Mackenzie. Transgender Nation (1994), Bowling Green State University Popular Press. ISBN 0879725966
• 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. ISBN 3593347474

See also

• Sexual fetishism
• Paraphilia
• Sadism and masochism as medical terms
• Henry and June, Anaïs Nin, 1986, p. 133. Reference to The Well of Loneliness.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Category:Krafft-Ebing Psychopathia Sexualis

• Psychopathia Sexualis, with especial reference to the antipathic sexual instinct, a medico-forensic study an early English translation at archive.org