THE STUDY OF SEXUAL INVERSION

Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 by Havelock Ellis is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE STUDY OF SEXUAL INVERSION

II.—THE STUDY OF SEXUAL INVERSION.

Westphal—Hössli—Casper—Ulrichs—Krafft-Ebing—Moll—Féré—Kiernan—Lydston—Raffalovich—Edward Carpenter—Hirschfeld.

Westphal, an eminent professor of psychiatry at Berlin, may be said to be the first to put the study of sexual inversion on an assured scientific basis. In 1870 he published, in the Archiv für Psychiatrie, of which he was for many years editor, the detailed history of a young woman who, from her earliest years, differed from other girls: she liked to dress as a boy, only cared for boys' games, and as she grew up was sexually attracted only to women, with whom she formed a series of tender relationships, in which the friends obtained sexual gratification by mutual caresses; while she blushed and was shy in the presence of women, more especially the girl with whom she chanced to be in love, she was always absolutely indifferent in the presence of men. Westphal—a pupil, it may be noted, of Griesinger, who had already called attention to the high character sometimes shown by subjects of this perversion—combined keen scientific insight with a rare degree of personal sympathy for those who came under his care, and it was this combination of qualities which enabled him to grasp the true nature of a case such as this, which by most medical men at that time would have been hastily dismissed as a vulgar instance of vice or insanity. Westphal perceived that this abnormality was congenital, not acquired, so that it could not be termed vice; and, while he insisted on the presence of neurotic elements, his observations showed the absence of anything that could legitimately be termed insanity. He gave to this condition the name of "contrary sexual feeling" (Konträre Sexualempfindung), by which it was long usually known in Germany. The way was thus made clear for the rapid progress of our knowledge of this abnormality. New cases were published in quick succession, at first exclusively in Germany, and more especially in Westphal's Archiv, but soon in other countries also, chiefly Italy and France.

While Westphal was the first to place the study of sexual inversion on a progressive footing, many persons had previously obtained glimpses into the subject. Thus, in 1791, two cases were published[114] of men who showed a typical emotional attraction to their own sex, though it was not quite clearly made out that the inversion was congenital. In 1836, again, a Swiss writer, Heinrich Hössli, published a rather diffuse but remarkable work, entitled Eros, which contained much material of a literary character bearing on this matter. He seems to have been moved to write this book by a trial which had excited considerable attention at that time. A man of good position had suddenly murdered a youth, and was executed for the crime, which, according to Hössli, was due to homosexual love and jealousy. Hössli was not a trained scholar; he was in business at Glarus as a skillful milliner, the most successful in the town. His own temperament is supposed to have been bisexual. His book was prohibited by the local authorities and at a later period the entire remaining stock was destroyed in a fire, so that its circulation was very small. It is now, however, regarded by some as the first serious attempt to deal with the problem of homosexuality since Plato's Banquet.[115]

Some years later, in 1852, Casper, the chief medico-legal authority of his time in Germany,—for it is in Germany that the foundations of the study of sexual inversion have been laid,—pointed out in Casper's Vierteljahrsschrift that pederasty, in a broad sense of the word, was sometimes a kind of "moral hermaphroditism," due to a congenital psychic condition, and also that it by no means necessarily involved sodomy (immissio penis in anum). Casper brought forward a considerable amount of valuable evidence concerning these cardinal points, which he was the first to note,[116] but he failed to realize the full significance of his observations, and they had no immediate influence, though Tardieu, in 1858, admitted a congenital element in some pederasts.

The man, however, who more than anyone else brought to light the phenomena of sexual inversion had not been concerned either with the medical or the criminal aspects of the matter. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (born in 1825 near Aurich), who for many years expounded and defended homosexual love, and whose views are said to have had some influence in drawing Westphal's attention to the matter, was a Hanoverian legal official (Amtsassessor), himself sexually inverted. From 1864 onward, at first under the name of "Numa Numantius" and subsequently under his own name, Ulrichs published, in various parts of Germany, a long series of works dealing with this question, and made various attempts to obtain a revision of the legal position of the sexual invert in Germany.

Although not a writer whose psychological views can carry much scientific weight, Ulrichs appears to have been a man of most brilliant ability, and his knowledge is said to have been of almost universal extent; he was not only well versed in his own special subjects of jurisprudence and theology, but in many branches of natural science, as well as in archeology; he was also regarded by many as the best Latinist of his time. In 1880 he left Germany and settled in Naples, and afterward at Aquila in the Abruzzi, whence he issued a Latin periodical. He died in 1895.[117] John Addington Symonds, who went to Aquila in 1891, wrote: "Ulrichs is chrysostomos to the last degree, sweet, noble, a true gentleman and man of genius. He must have been at one time a man of singular personal distinction, so finely cut are his features, and so grand the lines of his skull."[118]

For many years Ulrichs was alone in his efforts to gain scientific recognition for congenital homosexuality. He devised (with allusion to Uranos in Plato's Symposium) the word uranian or urning, ever since frequently used for the homosexual lover, while he called the normal heterosexual lover a dioning (from Dione). He regarded uranism, or homosexual love, as a congenital abnormality by which a female soul had become united with a male body—anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa—and his theoretical speculations have formed the starting point for many similar speculations. His writings are remarkable in various respects, although, on account of the polemical warmth with which, as one pleading pro domo, he argued his cause, they had no marked influence on scientific thought.[119]

This privilege was reserved for Westphal. After he had shown the way and thrown open his journal for their publication, new cases appeared in rapid succession. In Italy, also, Ritti, Tamassia, Lombroso, and others began to study these phenomena. In 1882 Charcot and Magnan published in the Archives de Neurologie the first important study which appeared in France concerning sexual inversion and allied sexual perversions. They regarded sexual inversion as an episode (syndrome) in a more fundamental process of hereditary degeneration, and compared it with such morbid obsessions as dipsomania and kleptomania. From a somewhat more medico-legal standpoint, the study of sexual inversion in France was furthered by Brouardel, and still more by Lacassagne, whose stimulating influence at Lyons has produced fruitful results in the work of many pupils.[120]

Of much more importance in the history of the theory of sexual inversion was the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing (born at Mannheim in 1840 and died at Graz in 1902), for many years professor of psychiatry at Vienna University and one of the most distinguished alienists of his time. While active in all departments of psychiatry and author of a famous textbook, from 1877 onward he took special interest in the pathology of the sexual impulse. His Psychopathia Sexualis contained over two hundred histories, not only of sexual inversion but of all other forms of sexual perversion. For many years it was the only book on the subject and it long remained the chief storehouse of facts. It passed through many editions and was translated into many languages (there are two translations in English), enjoying an immense and not altogether enviable vogue.

Krafft-Ebing's methods were open to some objection. His mind was not of a severely critical order. He poured out the new and ever-enlarged editions of his book with extraordinary rapidity, sometimes remodelling them. He introduced new subdivisions from time to time into his classification of sexual perversions, and, although this rather fine-spun classification has doubtless contributed to give precision to the subject and to advance its scientific study, it was at no time generally accepted. Krafft-Ebing's great service lay in the clinical enthusiasm with which he approached the study of sexual perversions. With the firm conviction that he was conquering a great neglected field of morbid psychology which rightly belongs to the physician, he accumulated without any false shame a vast mass of detailed histories, and his reputation induced sexually abnormal individuals in all directions to send him their autobiographies, in the desire to benefit their fellow-sufferers.

It is as a clinician, rather than as a psychologist, that we must regard Krafft-Ebing. At the outset he considered inversion to be a functional sign of degeneration, a partial manifestation of a neuropathic and psychopathic state which is in most cases hereditary. This perverse sexuality appears spontaneously with the developing sexual life, without external causes, as the individual manifestation of an abnormal modification of the vita sexualis, and must then be regarded as congenital; or it develops as a result of special injurious influences working on a sexuality which had at first been normal, and must then be regarded as acquired. Careful investigation of these so-called acquired cases, however, Krafft-Ebing in the end finally believed, would indicate that the predisposition consists in a latent homosexuality, or at least bisexuality, which requires for its manifestation the operation of accidental causes. In the last edition of his work Krafft-Ebing was inclined to regard inversion as being not so much a degeneration as a variation, a simple anomaly, and acknowledged that his opinion thus approximated to that which had long been held by inverts themselves.[121]

At the time of his death, Krafft-Ebing, who had begun by accepting the view, at that time prevalent among alienists, that homosexuality is a sign of degeneration, thus fully adopted and set the seal of his authority on the view, already expressed alike by some scientific investigators as well as by inverts themselves, that sexual inversion is to be regarded simply as an anomaly, whatever difference of opinion there might be as to the value of the anomaly. The way was even opened for such a view as that of Freud and most of the psychoanalysts today who regard a strain of homosexuality as normal and almost constant, with a profound significance for the psychonervous life. In 1891 Dr. Albert Moll, of Berlin, published his work, Die Konträre Sexualempfindung, which subsequently appeared in much enlarged and revised editions. It speedily superseded all previous books as a complete statement and judicious discussion of sexual inversion. Moll was not content merely to present fresh clinical material. He attacked the problem which had now become of primary importance: the nature and causes of sexual inversion. He discussed the phenomena as a psychologist even more than as a physician, bearing in mind the broader aspects of the problem, keenly critical of accepted opinions, but judiciously cautious in the statement of conclusions. He cleared away various ancient prejudices and superstitions which even Krafft-Ebing sometimes incautiously repeated. He accepted the generally received doctrine that the sexually inverted usually belong to families in which various nervous and mental disorders prevail, but he pointed out at the same time that it is not in all cases possible to prove that we are concerned with individuals possessing a hereditary neurotic taint. He also rejected any minute classification of sexual inverts, only recognizing psycho-sexual hermaphroditism and homosexuality. At the same time he cast doubt on the existence of acquired homosexuality, in a strict sense, except in occasional cases, and he pointed out that even when a normal heterosexual impulse appears at puberty, and a homosexual impulse later, it may still be the former that was acquired and the latter that was inborn.

In America attention had been given to the phenomena at a fairly early period. Mention may be specially made of J. G. Kiernan and G. Frank Lydston, both of whom put forward convenient classifications of homosexual manifestations some thirty years ago.[122] More recently (1911) an American writer, under the pseudonym of Xavier Mayne, privately printed an extensive work entitled The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life, popularly written and compiled from many sources. This book, from a subjective and scarcely scientific standpoint, claims that homosexual relationships are natural, necessary, and legitimate.[123]

In England the first attempts to deal seriously, from the modern point of view, with the problem of homosexuality came late, and were either published privately or abroad. In 1883 John Addington Symonds privately printed his discussion of paiderastia in ancient Greece, under the title of A Problem in Greek Ethics, and in 1889-1890 he further wrote, and in 1891 privately printed, A Problem of Modern Ethics: Being an Enquiry into the Phenomena of Sexual Inversion. In 1886 Sir Richard Burton added to his translation of the Arabian Nights a Terminal Essay on the same subject. In 1894 Edward Carpenter privately printed in Manchester a pamphlet entitled Homogenic Love, in which he criticised various psychiatric views of inversion at that time current, and claimed that the laws of homosexual love are the same as those of heterosexual love, urging, however, that the former possesses a special aptitude to be exalted to a higher and more spiritual level of comradeship, so fulfilling a beneficent social function. More recently (1907) Edward Carpenter published a volume of papers on homosexuality and its problems, under the title of The Intermediate Sex, and later (1914) a more special study of the invert in early religion and in warfare, Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk.

In 1896 the most comprehensive book so far written on the subject in England was published in French by Mr. André Raffalovich (in Lacassagne's Bibliothèque de Criminologie), Uranisme et Unisexualité. This book dealt chiefly with congenital inversion, publishing no new cases, but revealing a wide knowledge of the matter. Raffalovich put forward many just and sagacious reflections on the nature and treatment of inversion, and the attitude of society toward perverted sexuality. The historical portions of the book, which are of special interest, deal largely with the remarkable prevalence of inversion in England, neglected by previous investigators. Raffalovich, whose attitude is, on the whole, philosophical rather than scientific, regards congenital inversion as a large and inevitable factor in human life, but, taking the Catholic standpoint, he condemns all sexuality, either heterosexual or homosexual, and urges the invert to restrain the physical manifestations of his instinct and to aim at an ideal of chastity. On the whole, it may be said that the book is the work of a thinker who has reached his own results in his own way, and those results bear an imprint of originality and freedom from tradition.

In recent years no one has so largely contributed to place our knowledge of sexual inversion on a broad and accurate basis as Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld of Berlin, who possesses an unequalled acquaintance with the phenomena of homosexuality in all their aspects. He has studied the matter exhaustively in Germany and to some extent in other countries also; he has received the histories of a thousand inverts; he is said to have met over ten thousand homosexual persons. As editor of the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, which he established in 1899, and author of various important monographs—more especially on transitional psychic and physical stages between masculinity and femininity—Hirschfeld had already contributed greatly to the progress of investigation in this field before the appearance in 1914 of his great work, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes. This is not only the largest but the most precise, detailed, and comprehensive—even the most condensed—work which has yet appeared on the subject. It is, indeed, an encyclopedia of homosexuality. For such a task Hirschfeld had been prepared by many years of strenuous activity as a physician, an investigator, a medico-legal expert before the courts, and his position as president of the Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitee which is concerned with the defense of the interests of the homosexual in Germany. In Hirschfeld's book the pathological conception of inversion has entirely disappeared; homosexuality is regarded as primarily a biological phenomenon of universal extension, and secondarily as a social phenomenon of serious importance. There is no attempt to invent new theories; the main value of Hirschfeld's work lies, indeed, in the constant endeavor to keep close to definite facts. It is this quality which renders the book an indispensable source for all who seek enlightened and precise information on this question.

Even the existence of such a treatise as this of Hirschfeld's is enough to show how rapidly the study of this subject has grown. A few years ago—for instance, when Dr. Paul Moreau wrote his Aberrations du Sens Génésique—sexual inversion was scarcely even a name. It was a loathsome and nameless vice, only to be touched with a pair of tongs, rapidly and with precautions. As it now presents itself, it is a psychological and medico-legal problem so full of interest that we need not fear to face it, and so full of grave social actuality that we are bound to face it.

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