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

Ultimately Krafft-Ebing also concurred with his bourgeois patients and correspondents that homosexual love was equivalent to heterosexual love and that it, therefore, was legitimate in a moral sense. In the last article that he wrote on the subject, and one which has particular meaning for today, Krafft-Ebing agreed that Ulrich's striving for the recognition of homosexual marriage proved that this kind of love was genuine and profound. Krafft-Ebing, however, continued to think that the masculine type of homosexuality was more respectable and sincere, and much more advanced than the effeminate types.

Krafft-Ebing was not only a major figure in sex research, but, according to Oosterhuis, a pioneer in the founding of modern psychiatry. In the first part of the nineteenth century, it had been the aim of alienists (as psychiatrists were then known) to cure a relatively small group of lunatics. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the mission had changed to concern for the fundamental irrationality of the human mind in general and the omnipresence of abnormality within society. Psychiatrists extended their scope from pervasive dysfunction to mental states that fell within the range of normal human experiences but yet might lead to mental disorders. Early on Krafft-Ebing himself turned away from the insane in the asylum (where he had started) and concentrated on his career in academia, his private practice, and his psychiatric writing.

In his work on sexuality, Krafft-Ebing hinted that the very boundary between the normal and the insane, which psychiatry had originally helped to institute, was fragile and permeable, an explanation which Oosterhuis believes is the key to modern psychiatry. In each succeeding edition of his Pyschopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing, relying on his correspondents and case studies, exhibited a growing understanding of the need to educate his readers about the sources of their sexual awareness, self-knowledge, and identity formation. By so doing he prepared the way for the acceptance of sexual variance in society at large. This positive and liberal-minded sexologist, in Oosterhuis' view, countered the biases of church, government, and the legal system by his more scientific approach, aimed at understanding. Although Krafft-Ebing never quite reached the favorable views of sexuality accepted at the end of the twentieth century, he prepared the way for them.

In short, though Krafft-Ebing had many of the attitudes and prejudices of the nineteenth century culture, he was a liberating force for change, and anticipated the attitudes of the last part of the twentieth century toward sexuality and identity. It might well be that we had to await for nearly a century after his death to have a biography because so many of his contemporaries were hostile to his liberalizing views about sex, and when societal attitudes began to change it was only a distorted version of Krafft-Ebing that survived, discouraging further research into his life. Although I have written some on Krafft-Ebing (Bullough, 1994), and was much more favorable toward him than most of my contemporary American readers, I must admit that if I was writing now, I would give him even more favorable treatment.