Sigusch, V (2004), "Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902. In memory of the 100th anniversary of his death", Der Nervenarzt (published January 2004), vol.75, no.1, pp.92–6, doi: 10.1007/s00115-003-1512-7, PMID 14722666, S2CID 22595330 Psychopathia Sexualis was one of the first books about sexual practices that studied homosexuality/bisexuality. It proposed consideration of the mental state of sex criminals in legal judgements of their crimes. During its time, it became the leading medico–legal textual authority on sexual pathology. The psychological dimension of sexuality first appeared as a typical constituent not of ‘normal’ heterosexuality but of perversion and masturbation. As Krafft-Ebing explained, certain mental stimuli, such as fantasies, prevented the spontaneous physiological process that supposedly characterised normal sexuality from taking its course. Later, however, he also drew attention to the decisive role of the mind in the development of sexuality in general. He considered normal sexual functioning as more than just the physical ability to have intercourse. Likewise, the satisfaction of the sexual urge was not only made up of physical release but also of emotional fulfilment. Moll’s discussion of the Contrectation drive implied a similar view. Both he and Krafft-Ebing postulated a complicated interaction between body and mind, including, as Krafft-Ebing phrased it, the ‘unconscious life of the soul’. 84 homosexuality". Oxford English Dictionary (Onlineed.). Oxford University Press . Retrieved 16 July 2018. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)

Krafft-Ebing believed that the purpose of sexual desire was procreation, and any form of desire that did not lead towards that ultimate goal was a perversion. Rape, for instance, was an aberrant act, but not a perversion, since pregnancy could result. An earlier industrial revolution in the West spelled great gains in technology and the sciences, as well as the faith that people put into scientists’ ability to explain the world in which we found ourselves. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Volkmar Sigusch: Geschichte der Sexualwissenschaft. Campus, Frankfurt am Main u. a. 2008, ISBN 978-3-593-38575-4, S. 175–193.Krafft-Ebing saw and viewed women as basically sexually passive, and recorded no female sadists or fetishists in his case studies. Behavior that would be classified as masochism in men was categorized as "sexual bondage" in women, which was not a perversion, again because such behavior did not interfere with procreation. Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing [1] (full name Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing; 14 August 1840 – 22 December 1902) was a German psychiatrist and author of the foundational work Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). Some years later Krafft-Ebing's theory led other specialists in the area of mental health studies to reach the same conclusion. His mother Klara Antonia Carolina was a daughter of the renowned Heidelberg legal scholar and defense attorney Carl Joseph Anton Mittermaier. His paternal lineage was ennobled in the year 1770 by Empress Maria Theresia and elevated to the Baronial status in 1805 by Emperor Franz II (as Franz I, Emperor of Austria).

So beyond the historic Cesare Lombroso [vi] influenced eugenic tone of hereditary defect and degeneracy used as the framework for scientific study of human sexual behavior, this book harbors a feel of fetishistic pornographic voyeurism; providing a place for what historian Henry Oosterhuis claimed as “a kind of forum that allowed homosexuals and others to breach the loneliness and alienation that characterized their lives within nineteenth-century bourgeois society.” [vii] Krafft-Ebing extensively and explicitly validates homosexual experiences. He was the first to claim innate homosexual tendency and advocated for its therapeutic treatment. There is no way of determining how much of Krafft-Ebing’s case studies detailed the actual sexual thoughts and experiences of his patients, and how much was a fabricated elaborate fantasy of the doctor himself. From a historical standpoint, this book is a classic example of medical science providing the only socially acceptable, albeit legal, outlet for the display, discussion, and venue of all matters sexual, in this case, the criminally deviant; hence the reason the book fell into public popularity, particularly with those who felt a sense of validation through Krafft-Ebing’s authentication of non-normative sexuality. Rosario, Vernon A (2002), "Science and sexual identity: an essay review.", Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (published January 2002), vol.57, no.1, pp.79–85, doi: 10.1093/jhmas/57.1.79, PMID 11892515, S2CID 29913060 Following Michel Foucault’s influential Histoire de la sexualité: La volonté de savoir (1976) [ History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge], several scholars have associated the emergence of psychiatric knowledge on sexuality with medical colonisation, replacing religious and judicial direction with scientific authority and restraint. 20 By differentiating between the normal and the abnormal, and by stigmatising deviance as illness, thus the argument runs, the medical profession, as the exponent of ‘biopower’, was not only constructing modern sexual categories and identities, but also controlling the pleasures of the body. Some historical studies, however, suggest that the disciplining effects of medical interference with sexuality may have been overemphasised. 21 Like other doctors, Krafft-Ebing and Moll indeed surrounded sexual deviance with an aura of pathology, and they echoed nineteenth-century stereotypical thinking on gender and sexuality in general. However, psychiatric theories, not least those of Krafft-Ebing and Moll, were far from static and coherent: their work embodied several ambiguities and contradictions. It cannot be regarded only as a disqualification of sexual aberration. Their publications were open to divergent meanings, and contemporaries – among them many of their patients, correspondents and informants – have indeed read them in different ways. Since Krafft-Ebing and Moll presented themselves as impartial, as well as humanitarian experts, and argued against traditional moral–religious and legal denunciations of sexual deviance as sin and crime, individuals approached them to find understanding, acceptance and support. Several of their patients and correspondents suggested that their works, which were illustrated with numerous case histories, were an eye-opener and had brought them relief. These publications not only satisfied curiosity about sexuality and made sexual variance imaginable, but might also be viewed as an endorsement of non-conformist desires and behaviours. The case histories, which included many (auto-)biographical accounts, letters and intimate confessions of perverts, revealed to readers that such sexual experiences were not unique. 22 At that time, male homosexuality had become a criminal offense in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, unlike lesbianism, although discrimination against lesbians functioned equally. After interviewing many homosexuals, both as his private patients and as a forensic expert, Krafft-Ebing reached the conclusion that both male and female homosexuals did not suffer from mental illness or perversion (as persistent popular belief held).Zwischenstufen [ Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types], Krafft-Ebing admitted that his earlier views on the immoral and pathological nature of homosexuality had been one-sided and that there was truth in the point of view of many of his homosexual correspondents who asked for sympathy and compassion. 18 Moll, whose thinking on sexual matters, in the context of his times, was at first, before the First World War, generally open-minded and pragmatic, afterwards became more conservative and nationalistic, especially when he turned against Hirschfeld and his Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee [Scientific Humanitarian Committee], which he had earlier supported by signing Hirschfeld’s petition. In Moll’s view, Hirschfeld and his adherents, by promoting homosexual emancipation and the popularisation of sexological knowledge, mixed up scientific sexology and a leftist political agenda. 19 This might explain why Moll, who in the 1890s, in the three editions of his Die In Krafft-Ebing’s work there was a gradual shift away from a classification of perversions within clear boundaries to a tentative understanding of ‘normal’ sexuality in the context of deviance. He ceased to make hard distinctions between normal and abnormal mental states as well as sexualities, holding that – in the fashion of experimental physiology – only quantitative differences along a scale of infinite variations could be made. In his Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie auf klinischer The central argument of this article is that the modern notion of sexuality, as we experience and understand it today, took shape in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, especially in the works of the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) and the neurologist Albert Moll (1862–1939). This modernisation of sexuality was closely linked to the recognition of sexual diversity, as it was articulated in the medical–psychiatric understanding of what, at that time, was labelled as sexual perversion. 1 Krafft-Ebing studied sadism as a pathology, and in contemporary understanding, it is closely linked to sexual crime. After their crime, sexual sadists behave normally until their next offense. They report no guilt or remorse. They usually feel a great relief of tension after the crime. Finally, they may consider that they are superior to the police, because they avoid detection. In fact, a sexual sadist "may feel himself to be inferior, except as regard to his offense" (Brittain, p. 199). This approach to understanding sexual crime in terms of sadism has its origin in Krafft-Ebing's research and papers.

On May 22, 1874, he opened the clinic in Graz and led it until 1880. After years of effort, he was finally relieved from the burdens of his dual role in such a way that he could give up the administration of the Feldhof institution. With appropriate modifications to the clinic and his appointment to a full professorship in 1885, he was solely a Professor of Psychiatry. Grundlage [ Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry] he wrote that the elements which constituted psychopathology were basically the same as those of healthy life and that only the conditions under which they developed differed. 58 In his turn, in his Die Conträre Sexualempfindung and Untersuchungen über die Many of Krafft-Ebing's manuscript notes are associated with case histories. Others are organised thematically (neurasthenia, hypnosis, electrotherapy etc), or are extracts from works by other specialists. Likewise the correspondence in the collection often relates to particular recorded cases, but there are separate groups of letters to and from family, friends, colleagues, publishers and university officials: these include some 43 letters by Krafft-Ebing to his grandfather, Anton Mittermaier, a lawyer, 1864-66, and photocopies of letters to his parents written from Italy, 1869-70. There is also a file of letters from members of the German Imperial family. Harry Oosterhuis: Stepchildren of nature. Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the making of sexual Identity. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2000, ISBN 0-226-63059-5.

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Boring, E.G. 1950. A history of experimental psychology, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0133900398 In 1920, the Krafft-Ebing Street was named after him in Vienna- Penzing (14th district). Likewise, a street was named after Richard von Krafft-Ebing in the German city of Mannheim and in the Austrian city of Graz (XI. District, Graz Mariatrost). Translations of various editions of this book introduced to English such terms as " sadist" (derived from the brutal sexual practices depicted in the novels of the Marquis de Sade), [10] " masochist", (derived from the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch), [11] " homosexuality", [12] " bisexuality", " necrophilia", [13] and " anilingus". [14] [15]

Kennedy, H (2001), "Research and commentaries on Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.", Journal of Homosexuality, vol.42, no.1, pp.165–78, doi: 10.1300/J082v42n01_09, PMID 11991564, S2CID 42582792 The following year, his wife Maria Luise Kißling (1846–1903), who was originally from Baden-Baden, joined him there. After a one-year stint at the newly established Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Strasbourg — the university clinic consisted of two beds in a room for men, another two-bed room for women, and two rooms for clinic management — the now thirty-two-year-old university professor had to tolerate these limitations only for a short time.

Heinrich Ammerer: Krafft-Ebing, Freud und die Erfindung der Perversion. (Versuch einer Einkreisung). Tectum, Marburg 2006, ISBN 3-8288-9159-4. In 2006, an independent film based on the book was made in Atlanta; the film was titled Psychopathia Sexualis. [3] Editions [ edit ] His book Psychopathia Sexualis later became a widely-published standard work. [3] In the same year, 1886, he was elected a member of the Leopoldina.