Customer Reviews

Psychopathia Sexualis: The Case Histories

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I was surprised that this edition of Krafft Ebing's classic work on bizarre sex had no reader reviews. I wanted to assure anyone who stumbled on this page that this book should be in the library of anyone interested in the human animal. Krafft Ebing doesn't really come up with any convincing theories as to why an action which is intended to propagate the species should evolve into such bizarre, nonreproductive practices (although in all fairness there probably aren't any universally accepted theories even now.) Poor Krafft Ebing spent years of his life trying to "help" homosexuals, masochists, sadists, fetishists,etc. etc., develop into "normal" people, but with very little success. It is worth noting that even though most of his patients came to him voluntarily hoping to be to be changed, his success rate was not very impressive-something to think about when one hears Evangelicals demanding that homosexuality be declared a disorder and who claim to be able to cure it. Of his case histories, my personal favorite has to be the man who could only achieve an erection by concentrating on the image of a male servant wearing highly polished patent leather boots-only highly polished patent leather would do. One's mind boggles at the process which must have occurred in this patient's skull to lead him from the biological urge to reproduce the species,which after all is what sex is for, into a fetish which made reproduction a very unlikely event. Modern psychology has more or less thrown up its hands and said, "They must be born that way." That's probably as good a theory as any, but since people "born that way" would fail to reproduce,why haven't these practices died out? If natural selection operates as advertised, one would think that fetishism and homosexualality would have disappeared by now. At any rate, Krafft Ebing's nonjudgemental view of his patients is a refreshing change from the brutal,sometimes savage outlook of most of his contemporaries. Like so many other basic works in abnormal psychology,this is an often unintentionally hilarious account of humanity's most interesting activity.