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In 1992 Harry Oosterhuis, professor of History at the University of Maastricht, discovered just under 1,400 patient records from Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing's private practice. In about 200 of these case histories he found patients’ letters and autobiographical accounts. Many of these accounts, dating from 1871 to 1902, were written in response to Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis. As such, they represent the faint surviving traces not only of the personal lives of late nineteenth-century patients but also of their encounters with Krafft-Ebing's published work. These autobiographical accounts comprise the heart and soul of this well-organised and articulate book, and they have provided Oosterhuis with the material for what is an insightful study of sexual identity and its making in the late nineteenth century.
Oosterhuis's book is revisionist in two basic respects. First, he suggests that our understanding of Krafft-Ebing needs to undergo a fundamental reorientation. Indeed, in many ways the book is an attempt to rehabilitate Krafft-Ebing. It takes issue with the interpretations made by historians of psychiatry such as Szasz and Shorter, both of whom have had little good to say about Krafft-Ebing, as well as with the work of social and cultural historians such as Toulmin, Schorske, and Rider, who have all but ignored Krafft-Ebing or obviated his influence by reducing the formation of sexual identity to an epiphenomenon of social and cultural trends. Oosterhuis is especially critical of ‘presentist’ accounts, which hold Krafft-Ebing to contemporary standards of virtue and chastise him for not standing the test of modern psychology. Oosterhuis sees the sexual revolution of the nineteen sixties as having relegated sexual repression to the ‘dustbin of history’, and hence as having made it more difficult to judge Krafft-Ebing in the context of his own age. Krafft-Ebing's bad press is thus in part due to his being viewed from the perspective of an ‘ideology of sex