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In 1969 an American mail-order company carried the following advert: ‘Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis. 624 pages. Startling case histories of unnatural sex practices, weird auto-erotic methods, sex—lust—torture -much, much more! Many of the hundreds of case histories are from secret files and hushed-up court proceedings. Monstrous strange, almost unbelievable sex acts! For mature adults only!’ (278). Harry Oosterhuis continues: ‘Today […] for the general public, Krafft-Ebing is not a household name [yet] his work marks a central moment in the constitution of the modern conception of sexuality’. The title of this study comes from an article of Krafft-Ebing's of 1892, and it was picked up in the confession of one of the contributors to it, a homosexual technical engineer who wrote: ‘innumerable times I have racked my brains to figure out whether science, or any of her free and unprejudiced devotees, could somehow think out a way to give us stepchildren of nature a more endurable position before the law and mankind’ (228). Krafft-Ebing was one of those who started this as yet unfinished task, and his influence on contemporary views of sexuality deserves the thoughtful presentation it receives here.
Oosterhuis places Krafft-Ebing both in the context of recent theorists of science like Foucault and Szasz and in a broad social and literary history of the nineteenth century, in which sexual difference had become a public issue and the genre of confessional autobiography made sexual identity a central platform for the romantic self. But he also stresses the importance of Krafft-Ebing's role as a clinician and administrator of clinics.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing was born in Mannheim in 1840 to a Catholic family ennobled in 1800. His doctoral dissertation on sensory deliria was based in part on ‘his personal experiences with hallucinations’ (77) and his grandfather, a professor of criminal law, may have influenced his choice of specialism and helped him to his first post, as