| Richard von Krafft-Ebing | |
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 Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing with his wife Marie Luise
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| Born | August 14, 1840 Mannheim, Baden, Germany |
| Died | December 22, 1902 Graz, Austria |
| 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 notable series of case studies of the varieties of human sexual behaviour. The book remains well known for his coinage of the terms sadism (from Marquis de Sade whose fictional manuscript follows a group of gentlemen who partake in brutal sexual practices) and masochism (from 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.
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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 psychosexual diversity and arguably one of the most influential books on human sexuality prior to Freud's works. Krafft-Ebing was 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:
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:
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 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 popular belief, that homosexuals did not suffer from mental illness or perversion.
Krafft-Ebing elaborated a biological theory of homosexuality as 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).
Charles Gilbert Chaddock translated four of the books into English:
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