Birgit Lang. History of the Human Sciences. Volume 34, Issue 2. February 2021.
For historians of psychiatry and sexuality, as well as for queer theorists, the normal has been a vexed and politically fraught term. Maybe the most complex issue in the critical discussion of the normal remains the fact that researchers have an implicit or explicit understanding of normality, despite critical reflectiveness and a nuanced understanding of the term. This is based on their education, their life experience, their cultural background, and their understanding of the world more broadly, among other factors, but also crucially on their specific disciplinary and institutional situatedness, including their understanding and use of academic genres. This article analyses the slippery notions of the normal and normality and the ways in which they relate to homosexual subjects and homosexuality in the work of two key thinkers of the fin de siècle: Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). To this end, the article focuses on Krafft-Ebing’s seminal case study compilation Psychopathia Sexualis (1886-1912) and Freud’s early theoretical writings and cases, including Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1991[1905]). As Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens have shown so skilfully in their recent critical genealogy of normality, Krafft-Ebing and Freud each contributed to the rise and popularization of the concept of the normal: Krafft-Ebing by charting a continuum between the normal and the abnormal already, and Freud by foregrounding the potential of the normal as a concept for charting a new model of sexuality, which led to the proliferation of the term normal in his writings (Cryle and Stephens, 2017: 270).
This article will show how homosexual subjects and the concept of homosexuality played a pivotal role in this undertaking. It unpacks the complexity of this shift, which follows a scientific logic, itself haunted by notions of norms and the normal that were not always easy to resolve, and which sometimes involved a certain amount of inspired conjecture on the part of both thinkers in order to develop and validate their models. Both Krafft-Ebing and Freud relied on differing tripartite models of normality. Krafft-Ebing focused on the differentiation between perversion, understood as an aberration of the sex drive, and perversity as a criminal act that might be motivated by illness (perversion) or by an individual’s ‘lack of moral aesthetic, legal beliefs’ (Krafft-Ebing, 1894: 56). Importantly, he imagined homosexuality as a variation of the normal and situated ‘normal’ homosexuals outside institutional contexts such as the clinic and the prison. As this article will show, a blindness to questions of gender played an intricate role in his reasoning, driven by an attempt to describe homosexuality and to normalize perversion—but one that widely ignored his own evidence as provided in the case studies of female homosexuals based largely inside the clinic. In Freud’s writings, meanwhile, the relationship between the normal and homosexuality became increasingly intertwined to the extent that homosexuality (although not necessarily homosexuals) came to be his key example to illustrate the slippage between a specific understanding of heterosexuality and abnormal psychological processes. While potentially enabling individuals to build productive knowledge of their own selves in therapy, homosexuality to Freud raised provocative questions about the internal process of psychological defence in psychotic individuals whose basic psychological conflict lay in a defence against homosexuality. For both thinkers—and indeed for a range of other experts and emerging sexual publics—homosexuality became a ‘boundary object’ between the normal and the abnormal, constructed differently to meet specific conceptual, therapeutic, and emancipatory needs and goals (Leigh Star and Griesemer, 1989).
Historians of sexuality have variously engaged with the German-speaking history of homosexuality (see, for instance, Bauer, 2017; Beachy, 2014; Eder, 2002, 2011; Hacker, 2015; Heinrich and Kirchkopf, 2018; Lybeck, 2014; Spector, 2016; Sutton, 2020). While much recent focus has been devoted to Germany’s most famous sexologist and homosexual rights activist, Magnus Hirschfeld, Krafft-Ebing’s and Freud’s contributions to the history of homosexuality in the German-speaking world are more implicit and ambiguous. Whereas Hirschfeld focused his academic attention towards the ‘third sex’, Krafft-Ebing and Freud were interested in sexuality in more general terms. They both saw homosexuality as neither a crime nor a moral failure and supported the decriminalization of homosexuality (see Bauer, 2003; Lang and Sutton, 2016), yet at the same time, homosexuals and homosexuality remained enigmatic boundary concepts and figures in their exploration of human sexuality exactly because Krafft-Ebing and Freud saw them as, by and large, ‘normal enough’.
Krafft-Ebing and Freud’s overlapping understanding of homosexuality has been widely contested, driven in part by Michel Foucault’s somewhat disdainful stance towards sexologists, and by criticisms of the normative understanding of homosexuality in post-war US psychiatry, which was for many decades dominated by conservative psychoanalysts. Such factors have created fertile ground for a critical discussion of both Krafft-Ebing and Freud by historians of sexuality (see, for instance, Katz, 2007; Oosterhuis, 2000, 2012). Among these scholars, Katz (2007: 57) most explicitly engages with the question of normativity, describing Freud both as a ‘major modern maker of heterosexuality’s ahistorical medical model and as a subversive theorist of heterosexuality’s social construction’. Katz thus highlights the ambiguous role of heterosexuality in Freud’s thought, which saw heterosexuality as originating in polymorphous perversion while still considering it the norm.
The question of normativity also haunts this article. As Dagmar Herzog (2017: 15) has put it recently, psychoanalysis as an intellectual endeavour was ‘in itself a symptom, and by no means just a cause, of an at least partial liberalization of sexual mores in Central Europe’. The richness of such discourses has been discussed in recent secondary literature in particular in regard to questions of the relationship of body and mind, which in the case of homosexuality focused on the question of congenital disposition (Sutton, 2020: 82-90), and of gender (Leng, 2018). In her much broader work, Sutton highlights Freud’s complex views on homosexuality and his shift towards sexual object (the person to whom a person is attracted) rather than aim (the sexual activities to which a person is drawn; Sutton, 2020: 76-7). Leng (2018: 24-5) identifies Krafft-Ebing and Freud as belonging to a handful of male physicians and psychiatrists who are ‘treated as “always already” authoritative and sharing a common worldview and set of attitudes about sex’, particularly in contrast to contemporary female writers on (homo)sexuality.
The question then arises how the analysis of these two thinkers can prove productive today. While their works undoubtedly became normative for generations of scholars, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts, Krafft-Ebing and Freud both established their framework of thinking against the norms of their time, Krafft-Ebing by mapping the modern landscape of perversion and Freud by (partially) collapsing the categories of perversion and healthy/normal. This article represents an attempt to reread a selection of their works through the lens of the normal rather than the normative, and it is here that the question of genre comes into focus. Recent work in the history of sexuality has highlighted ways in which, throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, case studies increasingly became vehicles for the dissemination of academic and expert knowledge about sex, as well as sites of contestation (see, for example, Berkenkotter, 2008; Lang, Damousi, and Lewis, 2017). Case studies are somewhat notorious for the instability of the knowledge they convey (Lang, Damousi, and Lewis, 2017: 2-4). They do, though, give often unprecedented and highly mediated insights into the lives of the subjects at their heart. Their analysis promises to lay bare the unsettled nature of understandings of sex, even in canonical thinkers such as Krafft-Ebing and Freud; it is a chance to look at these cases and their underlying theories anew.
For Krafft-Ebing, case study compilations such as his main work, Psychopathia Sexualis, represented the rhetorical form of choice, and indeed this case modality constituted a popular form for the psychiatric textbook in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is true that individual cases and specific groups of cases from case study compilations such as Psychopathia Sexualis have garnered attention as source texts for the history of homosexuality and masochism, and for analysing Krafft-Ebing’s engagement with his patients (Lang, 2017; Oosterhuis, 2000; Spector, 2016: 124-9), as well as for the reverse engagement of homosexual subjects with Krafft-Ebing (Bauer, 2003, 2009). The collective genre of the case study compilation, however, has received very little critical attention. Empirical in impetus, the case study compilation comprises a mixture of academic discourse and case vignettes. In Psychopathia Sexualis, the academic expert discourse is written in a neutral scientific voice, using and sometimes forging medical vocabulary, and exploring new phenomena and disorders. By contrast, the corresponding case vignettes resemble clinical case notes: they are visually distinct—often printed in a smaller font and slightly offset—and usually indexed numerically. These interspersed cases function as both evidence and illustration of the specific disorders outlined in the main text.
By their nature, case studies are what Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson have defined as ‘heterotexts’—that is, they are a form of narrative that incorporates ‘varying strands of influence and agency, absorbing or incorporating differing subjectivities, and speaking in multiple voices’ (Stone and Thompson, 2006: 19). This is not to imply that modern notions of authorship did not shape the case study compilation; Krafft-Ebing was clearly perceived as the author of Psychopathia Sexualis by his contemporaries, fellow doctors and patients alike. Rather, to identify case study compilations as ‘heterotexts’ permits a more complex understanding of the workings of this case modality. When it comes to homosexuality and homosexual subjects, Psychopathia Sexualis proffers a range of different identity constellations, as we will see, yet the key interest in this article is to perceive the instability of such knowledge and how Krafft-Ebing navigated such epistemological insecurity within the confines of the publication itself.
While Krafft-Ebing normalized perversion through giving ‘perverts’ a voice without necessarily listening to them, Freud’s embrace of the normal was thoroughly tied to destabilizing its meaning. As I have shown elsewhere, Freud’s dialogic-psychoanalytic case study was defined by an inversion of the genre itself (Lang, Damousi, and Lewis, 2017: 73-8). Whereas Krafft-Ebing relied on a strong academic framing narrative, Freud commonly sidelined his main argument in an attempt to distract the reader from contentious subject matter. He also used particularization—that is, the limitation of a case to a specific aspect—as a means to mediate the tension between individual case history and generalization. In so doing, he made the case study (and not its framing narrative) the site of theory formation. Again, there exists comparatively little exploration of the case study genre in Freud (see Forrester, 1996; Kiceluk, 1992; Lang and Sutton, 2016; Sealey, 2011), despite the fact that discussion of some of his cases, in particular Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, formed the centre of the Freud critique by second-wave feminists and others. Yet, as we will see, his thinking in cases influenced his take on (homo)sexual normality, which he invoked and marginalized at the same time.
Normalizing perversion: Richard von Krafft-Ebing
The fact that the normal appears as a composite of a range of mental and physical factors ‘that were not fixed and did not conform to a single standard’ was Krafft-Ebing’s central contribution to the genealogy of normality (Cryle and Stephens, 2017: 272). Krafft-Ebing used the term normal only occasionally, and the normal remained a flexible and somewhat unassuming concept in Psychopathia Sexualis. In the cases concerning homosexual subjects, the normal was commonly ascribed to the physical presentation of genitalia, a body-centric tendency in the 19th-century era of sex that Krafft-Ebing helped to reshape (Davidson, 1987). Analysing the case vignettes relating to homosexual subjects in Psychopathia Sexualis vis-a-vis his broader discursive argument about homosexuality reveals a contradictory plurality of meaning. These meanings stem from a range of tensions arising, on the one hand, from the case vignettes, which were decisively gendered and drew from both inside and outside the clinic, and, on the other hand, from Krafft-Ebing’s broader conclusions relating to his understanding of homosexuality, some of which were supported and others contradicted by these diverse cases. This in turn raises questions about the role of case vignettes within Psychopathia Sexualis, but also about Krafft-Ebing’s ability to tolerate significant dissonance among the cases presented. I suggest that, based particularly on his cases of institutionalized female homosexuals, he could have come to quite different conclusions about homosexuality, yet his understanding seems largely correlated with the homosexual male experience as described in his work.
Foucauldian scholars have long been critical of the classificatory powers of sexology and psychiatry—Krafft-Ebing being a prime example—even as some of these scholars have also highlighted Krafft-Ebing’s affirmative stance on the question of decriminalization and his excellent rapport with homosexual subjects in his care. Krafft-Ebing biographer Harry Oosterhuis was the first to underline the sexologist’s amicable relationship to his patients. Letters to Krafft-Ebing that survive in the Krafft-Ebing papers in the Wellcome Library (London) additionally reveal a civility and respectfulness in tone on the part of his patients. Ivan Crozier (2008) similarly points to the trust that patients invested in doctors in such encounters. Other scholars have highlighted the identificatory readings of Psychopathia Sexualis by members of early sexual publics, including notions of (erotic) self-intensification (Felski, 2008: 39), that is, the identificatory and in our instance often eroticized interpretation of its case vignettes (cf. Bauer, 2003; Lang, 2017; Verhoeven, 2015).
The following analysis takes the male and female homosexual patients of Krafft-Ebing’s description as an example to investigate how perversion and perversity—and, implicitly, the normal—were conceptualized in the discursive structure of Psychopathia Sexualis, and explores what kinds of tensions and contradictions existed between Krafft-Ebing’s argument and the case studies he presented. It argues, in line with Laura Doan (2013: 133), that the ‘utter confusion over gender points with some clarity to the possibilities of a queer historiography that takes into account how gender and sexuality are intertwined in order to understand categorization itself as historical and historicized’, but posits that a great ‘topsy turvydom’ of identity categories already existed in the late 19th century and not only by the onset of World War I. It also highlights how fluid and paradoxical the knowledge presented by Krafft-Ebing was, despite its classificatory prowess and powers.
Perversion: Outside the clinic
Psychopathia Sexualis was crucially informed by lay correspondents who were attracted to the open-minded attitude of sexology and science towards homosexuals and other ‘stepchildren of nature’ (Krafft-Ebing, 1894: vi; Oosterhuis, 2000). These people, among them many gay men, wrote to Krafft-Ebing on a voluntary basis from outside the clinic. While sometimes seen in a critical light in secondary literature as informants of medical discourse, these correspondents worked with Krafft-Ebing to establish a better understanding of their condition for themselves and sometimes also for others.
In the ninth edition of Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing published seven autobiographical accounts by homosexuals based on correspondence. Together with the case vignettes of three masochists and a fetishist, their autobiographies corresponded with Krafft-Ebing’s key scientific interests: homosexuality, masochism, and hyperesthesia, or heightened sexual sensitivity (cases 42, 48, 58, 88, 97, 98, 107, 109, 111, 119, and 129). These individuals often wrote to Krafft-Ebing from abroad, or at least from outside Vienna. They explicitly stated their attraction to the liberal attitude of sexology and science towards homosexuals and explained that the comparatively unbiased nature of scientific discourse motivated their communication.
During his lifetime, Krafft-Ebing emphasized the scientificity of his research for the natural sciences and jurisprudence (Krafft-Ebing, 1894: v). The role of science—the German term Wissenschaft includes the field of medicine—and the respectability of the medical profession were instrumental to the ways in which in particular male patients conceptualized their relationship with Krafft-Ebing as a medical expert. Krafft-Ebing was well aware of how vulnerable the position of ‘stepchildren of nature’ was in society. In the instance of Krafft-Ebing’s male homosexual patients, case vignettes reveal considerable societal, familial, and spousal expectations and pressures. Men feared that they would not be able to demonstrate the (hetero)sexual appetite expected of them or to father children. Business considerations were referenced twice as reasons to be pressured into marriage, as were family demands. Case vignette 108 described how ‘the last of a rich and noble house [was] urged by the pressing wish of his father to be married at last’ (ibid.: 252). Maybe the most self-reflective and nuanced statement in this context was presented by the subject behind case vignette 109: ‘The loneliness of my life as a rural physician, the wish to have children, drove me to marriage. I also wanted to put an end to common gossip and I hoped to triumph over my fatal sexual inclinations’ (ibid.: 258).
Krafft-Ebing’s correspondents possessed the ability and willingness to contribute to scientific discourse by composing autobiographies that detailed aspects of their life stories—with special reference to their sexuality, and often in a scientific style. Case 112, for instance, asserted he was convinced that
the mystery of our existence can only be unravelled or at least illuminated by unbiased men of science. I delineate the course of my life solely for the purpose, to thus possibly contribute to the illumination of this cruel error of nature and in doing so conceivably be of service to later generations of individuals sharing the same fate; since Uranians [homosexuals] will exist as long as human beings are born, just as it is an unfailing fact that they exist in any age. (Krafft-Ebing, 1894: 270)
This direct appeal to science as a liberal and objective force was not unusual at a time where, in middle-class consciousness, notions of liberalism were connected to science. It also reveals the correspondents’ desire to be fully accepted by a medical expert and, in that sense, a father figure, and not treated with bias. To these voluntary contributors, being published in a case study compilation offered new opportunities for self-expression: the intimate exchange with the medical expert Krafft-Ebing, and the potential presentation of their case to an early sexual public comprising the lay readers of Psychopathia Sexualis. This seemed an attractive prospect for gay men in particular since, in this period, the other Western traditions that ‘developed practices centered on cases’ were law and theology (Forrester, 2015), both of which condemned or criminalized male homosexuality.
Perversion or perversity: Inside the clinic/prison
The transgression of norms that Krafft-Ebing was confronted with in his daily work as a clinician was of a different character than his correspondences with ‘stepchildren of nature’. These included inpatients and those facing court trials whom he had to assess and/or treat psychiatrically. The relationship to these cohorts was more complicated, since this clientele found it harder to trust the physicians overseeing their care/treatment. This was not a sophisticated exchange between an expert and his subjects, based on a shared belief in the narrative of science and markers of middle-class identity.
A close analysis of the nine case vignettes of homosexual women reveals that, for them, the confessional space between doctor and patient was full of tensions, both explicit and implicit. This was due partly to the fact that the majority did not engage with Krafft-Ebing on a voluntary basis. Two were transferred into Krafft-Ebing’s care on the insistence of their husband or caretaker (cases 121 and 125), and two women were involved in court proceedings that, while unrelated to their homosexuality, scrutinized their sexual identities as part of their trials (cases 124 and 127). A further two women sought Krafft-Ebing’s advice on entirely unrelated matters: case 120, a governess, wished to be cured of her nervous disorder, and case 126 presented to Krafft-Ebing due to spinal irritation and chronic sleeplessness, which had led to morphine addiction.
Accordingly, the confessional nature of the encounter between patient and doctor became more burdensome for both parties, shaped as it was by a narrative of elicitation and resistance. In one instance, for example, Krafft-Ebing needed to state his belief that ‘the trust of the patient can be gained’ (Krafft-Ebing, 1894: 283). This phrase indicates a hurdle in the doctor-patient relationship absent in the exchange with his male correspondents. Another woman only reluctantly confessed ‘that already as a little girl she preferred horses and male activities, but never showed interest in female ones. Later she was particularly fond of reading and aspired to become a teacher’ (ibid.: 295). One patient apparently ‘found it hard to disclose her sexual abnormality’; another could not bring herself to report in detail on a period of her life in which she became an onanist (ibid.: 285, 290). The latter related, however, that at one point she became ‘sexually very aroused and had to send both girls away from home to protect them from something terrible, while she could keep her two boys home!’ This admission of sexual desire—at that moment troublesomely directed towards her own young daughters—was filled with hesitation and shame, far removed from arguments about normality or social acceptance, as in the gay male narratives, and characterized by a certain amount of trepidation and despair (ibid.: 285).
Another unexpected and unruly side to the clinic and this group of patients emerges from Krafft-Ebing’s comment that some female subjects known to him had had relationships with one another. Case 122 had had a relationship with a lesbian about whom Krafft-Ebing had published a case study elsewhere: ‘On the occasion of a summer holiday, she met a female homosexual, whose patient history I published as a case vignette 6 in the journal Irrenfreund, 1884, No. 1’ (Krafft-Ebing, 1894: 290-1). The same woman at another time had also engaged in a relationship with the woman described in case vignette 126, and ‘has a not purely platonic love relationship with patient 122 to whom she directs tender letters like a lover to his mistress’ (ibid.: 295). Also, once hospitalized, she ‘could only be restrained from lewd attacks on other female patients through diligent monitoring’ (ibid.: 295). Overall, then, the cases of female homosexuality that Krafft-Ebing described were more notorious and removed from ideas of bourgeois respectability than those of gay men.
A greater fluidity also existed in the case studies on women when it came to marital life and sex. While the heteronormative expectations on men appear clearly articulated in the case vignettes, not all women were experienced in or savvy about sex when entering marriage, and some were bitterly disappointed. ‘She loves her husband dearly for his intellectual qualities, but intercourse presented agony, and she performed it reluctantly and without ever feeling satisfied by it’, wrote Krafft-Ebing of one patient (Krafft-Ebing, 1894: 290). Some women never married, one having rejected a marriage proposal (case 126). Others felt that marriage provided them with an escape from the parental home (case 122), or from their own feelings for members of the same sex. They were willing to consider ‘marriage for maintenance’ (case 120). Others married without hesitation, as described in case vignette 121, where a woman—left by her female partner, who married first—herself married a man, ‘because he was rich, partial to her and of a personable nature’ (Krafft-Ebing, 1894: 289). The subject of case 119, however, decided against marriage, ‘because her [future] children could have potentially inherited her unhappiness or she could have made a trusting man unhappy’ (ibid.: 286).
While men were supposed to provide for their wives, both financially and sexually—this, in turn, creating pressures for those not fulfilling such expectations—women were, by and large, economically dependent on their husbands and had more to lose: their livelihood and, if they had them, their children. If a man did not fulfil his marital duties, the marriage could be annulled. Women, on the other hand, had no legal right (albeit individual agency) to refuse intercourse. For men, work and family represented different realms of their lives; for women, family more likely provided the main focus of existence, with only limited opportunities to become financially independent. This was the case for both middle- and working-class women, of whom only few worked in factories at the time (Frevert, 1989: 77ff; Kitchen, 2012: 141). Considering the social stigma and economic consequences of divorce, it seems less surprising that female sexuality came into the limelight by accident, and sometimes to detrimental effect. For those women in professional roles (teachers, for example), to be formally diagnosed as homosexual would have meant loss of employment or at least an associated danger of blackmail, which constituted a great problem for homosexual men at the time as well.
These case vignettes demonstrate that, by and large, homosexual women did not hope to gain respectability from Krafft-Ebing the way homosexual men did—or, if they did in other ways, this went unnoticed. Rather, their cases contained sexual transgressions, real and imagined, that would have fit the labels of perversion and perversity. Like Krafft-Ebing, scholars after him have found it hard to explore the agency of homosexual women vis-a-vis medical discourse at this time (see Beccalossi, 2012; Faderman, 1981; Hacker, 2015; Jennings, 2007). The cases presented seem more in line with the Foucauldian understanding of elicitation of truth, where ‘confession serves first to identify the unavoidable and necessary expressions of the pathology itself, without a potential connection to a therapeutic intervention’ (Savoia, 2010: 29). As described above, many of Krafft-Ebing’s female subjects seem to have been reticent, relatively unwilling participants in the exchange with the sexologist, and some of them—at least in the way they were presented—seem not to have cared if their desire was judged as immoral or perverse.
Normalizing female homosexuality: Perversion over perversity
In contrast to these varied case vignettes, Krafft-Ebing’s diagnostic deliberations about homosexual subjects seem strangely uniform, and present as a generalization of the experience of homosexual men with their middle-class sensibilities and their interest in science. At the same time, some of his case-based evidence would have allowed for describing female homosexuality as an example of perversity rather than perversion. The eloquence and insightfulness of his male correspondents likely made them more trustworthy informants than the women he met in the clinic, who were much harder to engage with and whose confessions, due to the very fact that they were institutionalized, seemed less reliable in practice. From a mental health perspective, they also presented as the more vulnerable population. As a member of the medical profession, whose brand of reasoning was characterized by the need to find laws for irregular phenomena, Krafft-Ebing may have found it professionally advantageous to contain the ambivalence in his data by implicitly focusing on his male subjects (Fleck, 1986: 39).
Krafft-Ebing was well aware of the uneven presentation of male and female homosexuals but saw no scientific reason why the rates of male and female homosexuality would be different: after all, degeneration and perversion were not seen as gender-specific phenomena (Krafft-Ebing, 1894: 280). Rather, he attributed the scarcity of case vignettes of female homosexuals to a greater resistance to confess willingly, and identified two main reasons for this. Firstly, he noted that female homosexuality was not criminalized in Germany, as it was in Austria (ibid.). This may explain why some of his lesbian cases came to light only when these women were accused of offences unrelated to their sexuality and why they may have been less impacted and politicized by this aspect of their lives than homosexual men. Secondly, he also assumed that lesbians passed more easily as heterosexual due to greater acceptance of the exchange of affection among women in society and due to the assumption (which Krafft-Ebing did not share) that their sex drive was lower. Women were generally more secretive than men when it came to their sexual proclivities, more flexible in their expression, and not as taken by the taxonomic impulse that engulfed male doctors and correspondents. That said, Krafft-Ebing was highly inclusive in presenting female cases in general, and lesbian cases in particular. In the ninth edition of Psychopathia Sexualis, the case vignettes he sourced from works of secondary literature were heavily male-dominated, with just under 10% (10 from a total of 106) concerning female patients. However, 21% of Krafft-Ebing’s own cases were concerned with female patients—16 from a total of 70, with 9 of these 16 being case vignettes of lesbians.
Krafft-Ebing’s assumptions and his attempt at methodological redress of his colleagues’ gender bias could not fully address the question of epistemological insecurity. His generalization of the male homosexual experience also led to a somewhat skewed perspective on female homosexuals. Hanna Hacker goes so far as to argue that the male-focused nature of the sexological project led to a partial identification of same-sex attracted women with the male sex, which she sees as the sole result of the gendered nature of society at the time (Hacker, 2015: 144). To Krafft-Ebing, ‘female masculinity’ (Halberstam, 1998) represented the key characteristic of the homosexual woman (see also Bauer, 2009; Breger, 2005). Indeed, Krafft-Ebing wrote:
The favourite place of the female homosexual is the playground of boys. In their games she tries to rival them. The homosexual girl does not want to know anything about dolls, her passion is the hobby horse, soldiers and robbers’ games.…Her appearance seems neglected, she takes pleasure in being a tough, tomboyish being. Instead of the arts, there is a sense and an inclination for science. (Krafft-Ebing, 1894: 281)
The only case study that obviously relates to this definition, however, is that of Sandor/Sarolta Vay (case 127), a transgender baron who was accused of fraud by the court, and whose accidentally discovered sex and gender became intensely scrutinized by both the courts and the public. Krafft-Ebing argued that Vay was enthusiastic about ‘everything beautiful and noble, [and had a] sense for science and the fine arts [alles Schöne und Edle, Sinn für Wissenschaft und schöne Künste]’ (Krafft-Ebing, 1894: 298), but he did not specify such interest for any of the other women described.
The scientific interest that Krafft-Ebing assumed homosexual women to have seems unsupported by the evidence provided. His key clinical case vignettes (120-127) do not relate directly to scientific discourse to make a claim about their experience. This lack coincides with the gendered nature of scientific discourse in the late 19th century, considering the differing education standards for girls and boys, the divergent expectations concerning their life courses, and the limited opportunities available to women for becoming scientists, or even attending university. This is not to say, though, that women never engaged with (sexual) science. Leng has shown powerfully how early feminist discourse around homosexuality developed just after the publication of the ninth edition of Psychopathia Sexualis, and that a select circle of female intellectuals used female homosexuality as a way ‘to envision a female subject unmoored from the expectations of reproductive heterosexual womanhood’ (Leng, 2018: 117). Austrian freethinker Rosa Mayreder also engaged closely with developments in the sexual sciences, and Krafft-Ebing’s theories shaped Mayreder’s navigation of her own sexual and gender identity (ibid.: 147). Not so with Krafft-Ebing’s patients: even the only case of a female homosexual Krafft-Ebing met outside the clinical context (ibid.: 119) made no argument based on the discourse of science, although she mirrored some of the arguments posited by homosexual men and provided Krafft-Ebing with an autobiographical account. Upon meeting her, Krafft-Ebing described her as a ‘highly educated person [feingebildete Persönlichkeit]’. Like many gay men included in the volume, she reportedly felt ‘outcast by nature and exposed by culture’ (‘[ausgestossen] von der Natur und [preisgegeben] von der Cultur’; all Krafft-Ebing, 1894: 287), yet he never noted her interest in science.
The actual case vignettes of homosexual women in Krafft-Ebing, then, cannot be easily summarized and illustrate the social, moral, and legal complexities homosexual women had to negotiate at the time. They reveal a relatively broad range of individual strategies for engaging with societal norms. The inclusion of the obstreperous cases of women in Psychopathia Sexualis makes them witnesses to a much unrulier side of homosexual desire (historically more often associated with gay men), which has been lost in the discussion of homosexuality in Psychopathia Sexualis but is at the same time contained in its pages. This was likely possible only due to the flexibility of Krafft-Ebing’s reasoning and the modelling of homosexuality as normal enough.
Invoking normality: Sigmund Freud
Freud drew considerably on Krafft-Ebing’s concepts and terminology, yet, rather than undertaking a mapping of perversions, his theory of sexuality made homosexuality more acceptable and othered it at the same time. In the context of their time, Krafft-Ebing and the early Freud seem easily identifiable as progressive and open-minded thinkers. Both understood homosexuals to have the capacity to live productive lives in society and supported the legal decriminalization of homosexuality, and in that sense made a stance against heteronormativity. Yet, while Krafft-Ebing engaged with the normal only implicitly, for Freud, the normal became polysemic, and the proliferation of the normal in Freud’s work—here analysed with a focus on his early case studies and a close reading of the first of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality of 1905—led to a cacophony of meanings, with homosexuality finding itself centre stage but still at the margins of the normal. At the same time, Freud criticized early identity politics as idealizing specific representations of homosexuality (see Lang and Sutton, 2016: 419-23; Makari, 2008: 114; Sutton, 2020: 78). Indeed, Freud was more cautious in his embrace of early homosexual identity politics than Krafft-Ebing, who provided some individuals with a platform. In his lectures, and specifically in his ‘XX. Lecture on the Sexual Life of Human Beings’ (1917), Freud asserted that ‘of course [homosexuals] are not, as they also like to assert, an “élite” of mankind; there are at least as many inferior and useless individuals among them as there are among those of a different sexual kind’ (Freud, 1963[1917]: 303). While sexologists like Magnus Hirschfeld fought hard to create a respectable image of homosexuals (see Bauer, 2017; Beachy, 2014: 171ff), Freud was more interested in a universal model of sexuality, and started to develop what he saw as a less idealizing aetiological model of (homo)sexuality.
What is normal? Bodies, psychical states, sexuality
To analyse the slippages that occurred between different understandings of the normal in Freud is to shed light on the historical development of psychoanalysis itself and to illustrate poignantly the stages of Freud’s intellectual trajectory. Freud used the word normal in his written oeuvre for the first time in his 1889 review of August Forel’s monograph on hypnotism. In this review, Freud’s usage of the word was shaped by his neurophysiologist origins, where the term was a means of assessing and commenting on physiological reactions of the human body. Freud also made use of normal as an adjective to qualify the outcome of medical tests in patients suffering from hysteria, as in references to the ‘normal examination of the fundus’ (Freud, 1966a[1889]: 45) or the ‘absolutely normal sensibility’ of skin next to ‘absolutely insensitive’ areas in such patients (ibid.: 48). This is a comparable use (albeit in a different medical specialization) to Krafft-Ebing’s description of genitalia as ‘normally’ developed, mentioned earlier.
Four years later, well into his investigation of hysteria in his 1893 case study ‘Frau Emmy von N’, the site of the normal shifted from the body of the patient to their consciousness. It is thus unsurprising that Freud’s case studies thereafter became a key site of his exploration of the normal. In ‘Frau Emmy von N’, Freud embarked on a journey to chart what he called the ‘normal psychical processes in human beings’ (Freud, 1966b[1889]: 99) and their ‘abnormal psychical states’ (Breuer and Freud, 1955[1893]: 11). The primary focus in ‘Frau Emmy von N’ was on the description of two dissociated states of consciousness in the patient, who was only ever able to access one state at a given time. Freud described the acute state of non-normality in one patient with a ‘pathological disposition’ as ‘hysterical delirium’ (Freud, 1955[1893]: 74; 76). It was this case study that saw the birth of the word Normalzustand (‘normal state’; Freud, 1991[1893]: 155; 1955[1893]: 98), with variations such as ‘de[r] normale[] Bewußtseinszustand[]’ or ‘der normale Zustand’ permeating the text (Freud, 1991[1893]: 101, 154): a slow convergence that is rather typical of Freud’s writing.
By 1905, in his Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, the meaning of normal had come to signify sexuality. Hysterical symptoms, Freud argued, ‘draw their strength not only from repressed normal sexuality but also from unconscious perverse activities’ (Freud, 1953a[1905]: 51). These shifts in the meaning of normal parallel Freud’s gradual journey from neuropsychiatry to psychoanalysis (Guenther, 2015: 72). In the case of the normal, different meanings remained in circulation in Freud’s oeuvre, although the emphasis of this usage changed. Indeed, we can find the term normal deployed as late as the 1916 ‘Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’ with all these meanings. Here, Freud talked at various points about ‘normale Sexualbetätigung [normal sexual life]’ (e.g. Freud, 1963[1917]: 307), yet his concerns clearly lay mostly with ‘das normale Seelenleben [normal mental life]’ (e.g. ibid.: 298). In relation to the former, he underlined that ‘dem Sexualleben der Normalen nur selten der eine oder andere perverse Zug abgeht [some perverse trait or other is seldom absent from the sexual life of normal people]’ (ibid.: 322).
Homosexuality started to play a role in the discussion of the normal in 1905. In Fragment, homosexuality was considered both an expected part of development and a perversion, normal in different phases of development—in youth, for example, where, if not sufficiently mastered, it could become ‘vicariously reinforced and even to some extent conscious’ (Freud, 1953a[1905]: 59). At the same time, Freud insisted that the afflicted patient should be protected from any criticism of her abnormal desires. He also argued that, to alleviate the suffering of the patient from hysteria, making conscious the internal conflict already present was helpful, since ‘affect attached to an unconscious idea operates more strongly and, since it cannot be inhibited, more injuriously than the affect attached to a conscious one’ (ibid.: 49). Freud furthermore reminded his readers that ‘the sexual life of each one of us extends to a slight degree—now in this direction, now in that—beyond the narrow lines imposed as the standard of normality’, and that such standards changed dramatically over time (ibid.: 50). While he called male homosexuality the ‘most repellent’ perversion of his time, he reminded readers that in ancient Greece it was normal and had an identifiable social function (ibid.). Freud took up some of these points in his 1920 article ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, in which he was rather critical of the parental intent to send the young woman at the heart of the case to therapy in the first place, and then again in his 1935 letter to the American mother of a homosexual, where he stated with great clarity:
Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. (Freud, 1951: 786)
Like Krafft-Ebing, he insisted that homosexuality was a perversion, yet, unlike Krafft-Ebing, he reminded readers that perversion played an integral part in the lives of all human beings.
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: On homosexuality
Freud’s stylistic prowess has often been commented upon, and renowned American literary critic Harold Bloom (1986) even called him the ‘most persuasive of modern discursive writers’. This assessment is based in particular on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and his case studies, on whose literary character Freud commented early on:
It still strikes me myself [!] as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own. (Freud, 1955[1893]: 160)
It was in Freud’s Three Essays that the normal took centre stage in his theoretical writings and, with it, homosexuality. More than any other sexual deviation, homosexuality permeated this 120-page work, particularly its first section, titled ‘The Sexual Aberrations’. Analysing the way Freud engaged with the normal and homosexuality from a rhetorical perspective has the potential to explain the tentative yet enduring entanglement of homosexuality and the normal of Freud’s works at the heart of this article.
In the Three Essays, Freud set out to describe two deviations from what he multifariously called ‘normal sexual life’, namely the deviation in respect to the sexual object and in respect to the sexual aim. Homosexuality constituted the key example of an identifiable group of people that differed from the norm in both respects. Freud argued that even among homosexuals there existed some variability in object choice: there were those who were attracted exclusively to the same sex (‘absolute inverts’), those who were attracted to both sexes (‘amphigenic inverts’), and those who under special external circumstances had satisfactory sexual encounters with a person of the same sex (‘contingent inverts’; Freud, 1953b[1905]: 135). He then explored and questioned in some detail the most common aetiologies of homosexuality at the time: as a sign of nervous degeneration; as a solely genetic condition; and as an expression of ‘bisexuality’, which in today’s parlance meant an overlap between homosexuality and phenomena such as transgender identities and intersexuality.
The rhetorical structure here, with its definition of homosexuality and the discussion of the aetiology presented in secondary literature, suggested to the reader that Freud was about to delve into a psychoanalytic theory of homosexuality. As often happened in Freud’s writing, such expectations were disappointed, and the reader was instead guided to a lengthy footnote that provided a sketch of a psychoanalytic aetiology of homosexuality. In the main text, Freud then discussed the varied sexual aims of homosexuals, soon concluding that ‘we are not in a position to establish a satisfactory explanation of the origin of inversion’ (Freud, 1953b[1905]: 146). In a rather humble sentence following this apparent setback, he stated that ‘it has been brought to our notice that we have been in the habit of regarding the connection between the sexual instinct and the sexual object as more intimate than it in fact is’ (ibid.).
What reads like a rather innocuous statement formed the basis of Freud’s new conceptualization not of homosexuality but of human sexuality in its entirety. Further on, he defined the normal sexual aim ‘as being the union of the genitals in the act known as copulation’ (Freud, 1953b[1905]: 149). This definition implied that a normal sexual aim for homosexuals represented an impossibility due to the lack of the combination of male and female genitalia. What seems astounding, however, is the fact that Freud argued that this differentiation between sexual object and aim applied to sexuality in general.
This spirited generalization of a perceived characteristic of homosexuality—the separation of sexual object and aim—was part of a wider textual strategy that portrayed sexuality and homosexuality as fluid phenomena—historically and socially as well as developmentally, which led to the overt use of the word normal. The constant playing with the reader’s expectations was highly evocative and lent a certain playfulness to the broader discussion of human sexuality. This textual strategy represented Freud’s attempt to whittle away unconscious resistance in his readers. Freud thus assured his self-identified heterosexual readers that there was indeed a difference between them and any deviant behaviour or desire, in particular their own, making them feel less guilty about potential transgressions (conscious and unconscious). Similarly, Freud encouraged homosexual readers to trust a text that considered them ‘a collection of individuals who may be quite sound in other respects’ (Freud, 1953b[1905]: 148), thus adopting Krafft-Ebing’s stance in relation to his patients.
Freud managed to continue to undermine readerly resistance for the better part of ‘Aberrations’ through this oxymoronic style of psychoanalytic writing. Yet a slippage occurred when Freud connected homosexuality to matters of mental health in the last part of the essay. As we have seen, homosexuals became his key example for the inversion of the sexual object and aim, and he attested that ‘inversion is found in people who exhibit no other serious deviations from the normal’ (Freud, 1953b[1905]: 138). This implied that overt homosexuals could be—but, we might add, were not necessarily—considered normal according to this second framework, in which he differentiated between the normal, neurosis, and psychosis.
Of neurosis and psychosis: The defence against homosexuality
If one were to summarize the Three Essays today with a focus on homosexuality, Freud’s key statements would suggest that: firstly, some homosexuals lead productive and happy lives; secondly, that homosexuality is a deviation from the heterosexual norm; and, thirdly, that it is a universal phenomenon whose expression is, at the same time, shaped by specific cultural contexts, and therefore varied. The most challenging point in his argument concerns the relationship between homosexuality and neurosis and psychosis.
In 1905, Freud described neurotics as people who were sexually and emotionally attracted to members of the same sex but had the inner psychological need to defend against this urge. According to Freud, ‘The unconscious mental life of all neurotics (without exception) shows inverted impulses, fixation of their libido upon persons of their own sex’ (Freud, 1953b[1905]: 165). Freud explored this insight at great length in later works, including two case studies, the already discussed Fragment and the 1911 work Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides). The defence against unconscious homosexual wishes played the most important role in his explanation of the development of paranoia in psychosis. While Freud never developed a specific theory of the onset of psychosis, he nonetheless gave the topic some in-depth thought. His Account of a Case of Paranoia represents ‘a conceptual leap’ in this regard, since this was the first time he made the subject central to his explanation (Trichet, 2011-12: 204). As was typical in Freud’s writing, he admitted his own hesitation in drawing this connection and mentioned his discussion with C. G. Jung, still an ally at this point, and Sandor Ferenczi in this context. Discussing with his peers a wide range of case histories that ‘included both men and women, and varied in race, occupation, and social standing’, he came to the conclusion that
a defence against a homosexual wish was clearly recognizable at the very centre of the conflict which underlay the disease, and that it was in an attempt to master an unconsciously reinforced current of homosexuality that they had all of them come to grief. (Freud, 1958[1911]: 58)
The model Freud sketched here described the development of paranoia as consisting of a projection of the unconscious desire to an outside world that was received as threatening: from ‘I love him’, to ‘I hate him’, to ‘He persecutes me’ (ibid.: 62). More than a decade later, he would characterize both neurosis and psychosis as divergent ways of dealing with an inner conflict: ‘In a neurosis the ego, in its dependence on reality, suppresses a piece of the id (of instinctual life), whereas in a psychosis, this same ego, in the service of the id, withdraws from a piece of reality’ (Freud, 1961[1924]: 182).
While these theoretical developments happened over time, the evocative and ambiguous nature of the Three Essays concerned in particular questions regarding the grey area between perversion and neurosis that were not yet fully formulated or remained unanswered. What was the relationship between overt homosexuals and neurosis? What happened if patients suffering from neurosis underwent psychoanalytic treatment and became conscious of their homosexual wishes? What happened if they worked through this constellation? What if they didn’t? How did neurosis play out in overt homosexuals? Such questions arose due to Freud’s insistence on an extremely wide definition of homosexuality (encompassing both sexual behaviour and unconscious same-sex desire). At the time, he pre-empted criticism of his position by pointing out that ‘many authorities…would prefer to lay stress upon their differences rather than their resemblances, in accordance with their own preferred view of inversion’ (Freud, 1953b[1905]: 137-8). Authorities, in other words, were defining homosexuals in their own fashion and driven by their own interests.
This was a daring statement considering the criminalization of homosexuality at the time. It identified the psychological need of authorities to define homosexuals and homosexuality, which also held true for Freud. As already mentioned, he made a similar argument in relation to the father’s role in ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, and was equally critical of the early identity politics of sexologists such as Hirschfeld. In line with his own penchant for the ambiguous, the cases he used to discuss homosexuality in more depth, namely the Fragment and A Case of Paranoia, rested on the analysis of their subjects’ unconscious homosexual wishes and not their conscious desires, let alone sexual enactments of same-sex desire. As Freud stated of former German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, ‘So long as he was healthy, Dr. Schreber, too, whose delusions culminated in a wishful phantasy of an unmistakably homosexual nature, had, by all accounts, shown no signs of homosexuality in the ordinary sense of the word’ (Freud, 1958[1911]: 59). So, while he conceded the importance of homosexual desire for human development and its important role in the development of the social and of friendship, he also identified the paranoic’s regression to a previous developmental state of narcissism, which defined homosexuality as a perversion in the psychoanalytic sense in the first place. His choice of ostensibly heterosexual subjects in his early case studies also meant that he avoided being drawn into the debate about the potential congenital nature of homosexuality that had dominated late 19th-century debates about homosexuality (Sutton, 2020: 64-9), and which might have undermined his argument. Instead, the focus on a particular aspect of a case history, and the fact that he used case studies as sites of theorization rather than reports of particular cases (in an attempt to protect the privacy of the subjects at their heart), meant that these cases left readers in the dark regarding detailed factual aspects of the case, which might have been of interest to early homosexual publics.
From today’s perspective, the conflation of homosexuality and the defence against it in Freud’s cases seems ambiguous for a range of reasons. The continuing legal and societal normalization of homosexuality in the Western world, the relative acceptance of LGBTI people, and the increasing awareness of mental health issues in society have led to a shift in our understanding of the normal. While the Three Essays represents a foundational text for psychoanalysis, it has been for queer studies too (Watson, 2009: 118). Psychoanalysis itself has revisited Freud and his writings on homosexuality: Jacques Lacan critiqued the paternal figure in Freud as normative rather than natural (Lacan, 2006[1966]: 182), and Freud’s own limitations have been further analysed and contextualized in a range of works (Dean and Lane, 2001; Drescher, 2002; Fink, 2017: 170-1; Fuss, 1995; Lewes et al., 2008). There now exists a better understanding of early analytic examples (Lang and Sutton, 2016) and the role played by conservative analysts in the second half of the 20th century (e.g. Herzog, 2017). Most importantly, psychoanalysts have also started to take responsibility for their part in normativizing practices that so shaped the period and did so in ways often detrimental to queer subjects, while insisting on the psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality in comparison to queer theory (Watson, 2019).
Conclusion: On norms
Krafft-Ebing and Freud are often seen as figures on opposing sides of a watershed moment in history. Yet the parallels between the two men are striking. Similar to Krafft-Ebing, Freud was interested in redefining the relationship between the normal and perversion. Their professional engagement with homosexual subjects and homosexuality provided them both with an opportunity to challenge norms. Krafft-Ebing did this through mapping perversions and giving some of his subjects a (mediated) voice; Freud, by challenging what he called the ‘angenommene Norm’ (literally, ‘the perceived norm’) about sexual development in the wider population (Freud, 1905: 34). That homosexuals became the key illustrative example for both had much to do with discrimination against, as well as the emancipatory striving of, gay men in particular, who flocked to Krafft-Ebing and his liberal views on homosexuality. Freud agreed with him in many ways and expanded Krafft-Ebing’s work by destabilizing the boundaries between the normal and homosexuality.
The shift in Krafft-Ebing’s and Freud’s understandings of homosexuality was both gradual and radical, and more exploratory in nature than we, with hindsight, tend to conclude. Krafft-Ebing saw overt homosexuals as the embodied manifestation of homosexuality and lobbied for the decriminalization of homosexuality, thus locating homosexuals outside the clinic and in society. Freud inextricably bound homosexuality to normality (and vice versa) by redefining homosexuals as a group in an inclusive manner, as well as by conceptualizing the fear of homosexuality as crucial in the formation of neurosis and psychosis, thus raising a new array of questions, many of which remained unanswered. His interest in internal psychological processes also meant that new facets of homosexual life started to become imaginable—including abnormal psychical states. Both crucially shaped the discourse surrounding homosexuals and homosexuality, and impacted the lives of homosexuals in various ways, mediated and illustrated in their case studies. Krafft-Ebing’s and Freud’s tripartite models of the normal in all their differences helped to add complexity to the contemporary understanding of homosexuality, in ways the history of sexuality is yet to fully acknowledge.