Step Children of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity. - Review - book review

Journal of Sex Research, Feb, 2001 by Vern L. Bullough

Step Children of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity. By Harry Oosterhuis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, 321 pages. Cloth, $30.00.

This well-documented book is the kind of historical study essential to understanding how current concepts of sex and sexuality developed. It challenges the Foucaultian interpretation, and moves Krafft-Ebing from what some have regarded as a negative influence on sexual attitudes to a position of having been a positive influence. Long in the making, this book is based on Krafft-Ebing's files, lovingly preserved by his family in the attic of his home where they remained undamaged by the destruction of two world wars. In addition to manuscripts of his publications, summaries and notes, and letters and postcards from friends and colleagues, the files include 1,386 case histories of his patients, dating from 1871 to 1902. In about 200 of these client records, letters, and autobiographical accounts, as well as correspondence with third parties, are also included.

Oosterhuis, a Dutch historian, discovered this treasure trove of documents by simply knocking on the door of Rainer Krafft-Ebing, the great-grandson of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in the summer of 1992. The house was the same one in which his great-grandfather had lived and the files were still in the attic where they had been gathered together when he died in 1902. Ultimately the family gave him free access to the files and even invited him to stay with them while he researched the papers.

Importantly, this book is more than a biography of Krafft-Ebing; it is essentially a history of sex research in the last part of the nineteenth century and of changing ideas about sexuality. The book also reveals just how much Freud owed to Krafft-Ebing and his contemporaries. Perhaps inevitably, in recent years as the history of sex research is finally being recovered it turns out that Freud's ideas about sex were heavily dependent upon what others had written (to whom Freud did not always give credit).

Krafft-Ebing is best known to American audiences for his Psychopathia-Sexualis, which went through 11 editions in his lifetime and continued long after he was dead (the book was updated and edited by others, including 2 editions by Albert Moll). However, this one book was but a small part of Krafft-Ebing's total scholarly output, since he wrote more than 25 other books and hundreds of specialized monographs. His subject matter was varied: from pedophilia to flagellation, from menstruation to hypnotism, from clinical case studies to historical essays. He also modified his position over the years, and these changes can be followed in the various updates of Psychopathia Sexualis as he continually added new cases (based more and more on his own clinical practice). This growth and change, however, is not evident in the English translations of his work, which covered only 2 of the many editions.

All editions of Psychopathia Sexualis give more concern to homosexuality than some other issues, but this is because understanding homosexuality seemed to be one of the dominating interests in Krafft-Ebing's own research and clinical studies. This interest seems to have been first aroused by Ulrichs, the influential writer on homosexuality. Ulrichs became a client of Krafft-Ebing's in 1869 and the two became friends, exchanging ideas on homosexuality. Greatly influenced by what Ulrichs said, Krafft-Ebing eventually became an advocate for decriminalization of homosexuality and was often called upon by the courts for advice on the topic.

It was Krafft-Ebing who popularized the term homosexuality. The use of such a term, he felt, was important to his clients because it emphasized what he believed was their psychological need for an identity which existed independently of conduct. In fact, he came to believe that a person could be homosexual without necessarily showing what was regarded as homosexual behavior. Krafft-Ebing also found in many of his case studies, much to his initial surprise, that love played a significant role in many same-sex relationships.

Although Krafft-Ebing conceptualized homosexuality as an inversion, what constituted inversion changed as he found that large numbers of homosexuals (whose autobiographies he collected) did not consider themselves effeminate at all. He began to regard homosexuality as an object choice rather than a gender inversion. Krafft-Ebing stressed that homosexuals were different from sodomites or pederasts, not only because he came to believe that most male homosexuals recoiled from anal intercourse and preferred other (in his eyes less offensive) sexual activities, but because of their homosexual state of mind which had begun to express itself from early childhood, independently of their sexual conduct. This notion allowed Krafft-Ebing to differentiate along a rigid line between contrary sexual feeling, be it inborn or acquired, and "irregular" same-sex behavior of normal men which he condemned as immoral.