Читать книгу The Changing Face of Sex - Wayne P. Anderson PhD - Страница 16

When I took my first internship in a psychiatric hospital in 1954, most of the psychiatrists had a copy of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) by Krafft-Ebing on their desks or in their bookshelves. Besides information from his own patients and those of colleagues he did forensic work for the courts that brought him into contact with a wider variety of pathologies. One of his goals was to show the court that these were medical (that is, psychiatric problems) and not legal problems.

Krafft-Ebing had a number of concepts we would consider very up-to-date today. For example, he saw normal men as attracted to certain features of a woman that he called fetishes that we have reconceptualized as being part of their love maps that attract them to one woman rather than another. He was also very aware of the influence of odors on passion and sexual arousal, treating these individual’s reactions as if they were normal. We have the same concept today except we label the odors pheromones.

Despite the fact his background in sexual aberrations was deep and that he had written the book primarily for physicians, Psychopathia Sexualis was one of the main vehicles for spreading the doctrine of sex as a disease.

Krafft-Ebing took the stance that it was normal for a young couple to fall in love,get married and in the early days of the marriage have occasional sex, mainly to have children. The sex he expects in a normal marriage is penis in vagina in missionary position. In his works he does not indicate any other sexual behavior that he has any sympathy for.

His book is loaded with case studies of fetishes, homosexuality, sadism and masochism. Although his work is treated as scientific, it is filled with examples of hereditary factors and moral degeneracy as precursors of abnormal behavior. The descriptions of the various sexual aberrations are detailed, and I suspect for many of us repugnant. On the other hand, it is certainly a great introduction and desensitization for therapists in training who may have to work with sadists and sexual torturers.

He is another of the “experts” of the period pushing masturbation as the beginning of abnormal sexual behavior and various health problems. He espouses certain behaviors as facts, such as masturbation, and where many pathologies start—similar to what was told to us by the coach in my seventh grade gym class as a warning against doing it. In Krafft-Ebing’s view, even energetic love play may lead to dire consequences. The simple tussling and the gentle love bite, if not contained, could lead to lust murder.