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Sexual disturbances were neither unknown nor unappreciated in ancient times. Ancient historians, such as Herodotus, and mythmakers seized on real events and perpetuated them in their lore; many of these stories were understood and accepted by the people because they sensed or understood the unconscious mechanisms involved without further explanations. Other stories were subjected to ritualized religious or demonic interpretations, as Schmidl * noted in 1962 (7, p. 543). In either event, the insights obtained were a good deal richer than later observations of pre-Freudian psychiatry or the current rigid and sterile European nosology.
Trethowan (8), in an analysis of a late medieval classification of sexual impotence, finds that, though masked by the voices of magic and demons, the classification much resembles modern psychodynamic thinking. For example, phantasms deceiving the senses (projections of unconscious processes), could, in the opinion of the medieval writers (e. g. of the Malleus Maleficarum), give origin to illusions of genital privation. Trethowan sees this phenomenon as an equivalent to rationalized castration anxiety. The figure of the witch, derived from erotic pagan fertility rites, said to interfere with sexual relations, can be understood as a projection of the tempting but punitive mother. The Malleus Maleficarum has been considered as “… one of the wickedest and most obscene books ever written”.
Observers of the classical age also described sexual problems, but their descriptions were more factual and empirical.