Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Vol. 1-6). Havelock Ellis
in quick succession, at first exclusively in Germany, and more especially in Westphal's Archiv, but soon in other countries also, chiefly Italy and France.[113]
While Westphal was the first to place the study of sexual inversion on a progressive footing, many persons had previously obtained glimpses into the subject. Thus, in 1791, two cases were published[114] of men who showed a typical emotional attraction to their own sex, though it was not quite clearly made out that the inversion was congenital. In 1836, again, a Swiss writer, Heinrich Hössli, published a rather diffuse but remarkable work, entitled Eros, which contained much material of a literary character bearing on this matter. He seems to have been moved to write this book by a trial which had excited considerable attention at that time. A man of good position had suddenly murdered a youth, and was executed for the crime, which, according to Hössli, was due to homosexual love and jealousy. Hössli was not a trained scholar; he was in business at Glarus as a skillful milliner, the most successful in the town. His own temperament is supposed to have been bisexual. His book was prohibited by the local authorities and at a later period the entire remaining stock was destroyed in a fire, so that its circulation was very small. It is now, however, regarded by some as the first serious attempt to deal with the problem of homosexuality since Plato's Banquet.[115]
Some years later, in 1852, Casper, the chief medico-legal authority of his time in Germany—for it is in Germany that the foundations of the study of sexual inversion have been laid—pointed out in Casper's Vierteljahrsschrift that pederasty, in a broad sense of the word, was sometimes a kind of "moral hermaphroditism," due to a congenital psychic condition, and also that it by no means necessarily involved sodomy (immissio penis in anum). Casper brought forward a considerable amount of valuable evidence concerning these cardinal points, which he was the first to note,[116] but he failed to realize the full significance of his observations, and they had no immediate influence, though Tardieu, in 1858, admitted a congenital element in some pederasts.
The man, however, who more than anyone else brought to light the phenomena of sexual inversion had not been concerned either with the medical or the criminal aspects of the matter. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (born in 1825 near Aurich), who for many years expounded and defended homosexual love, and whose views are said to have had some influence in drawing Westphal's attention to the matter, was a Hanoverian legal official (Amtsassessor), himself sexually inverted. From 1864 onward, at first under the name of "Numa Numantius" and subsequently under his own name, Ulrichs published, in various parts of Germany, a long series of works dealing with this question, and made various attempts to obtain a revision of the legal position of the sexual invert in Germany.
Although not a writer whose psychological views can carry much scientific weight, Ulrichs appears to have been a man of most brilliant ability, and his knowledge is said to have been of almost universal extent; he was not only well versed in his own special subjects of jurisprudence and theology, but in many branches of natural science, as well as in archeology; he was also regarded by many as the best Latinist of his time. In 1880 he left Germany and settled in Naples, and afterward at Aquila in the Abruzzi, whence he issued a Latin periodical. He died in 1895.[117] John Addington Symonds, who went to Aquila in 1891, wrote: "Ulrichs is chrysostomos to the last degree, sweet, noble, a true gentleman and man of genius. He must have been at one time a man of singular personal distinction, so finely cut are his features, and so grand the lines of his skull."[118]
For many years Ulrichs was alone in his efforts to gain scientific recognition for congenital homosexuality. He devised (with allusion to Uranos in Plato's Symposium) the word uranian or urning, ever since frequently used for the homosexual lover, while he called the normal heterosexual lover a dioning (from Dione). He regarded uranism, or homosexual love, as a congenital abnormality by which a female soul had become united with a male body—anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa—and his theoretical speculations have formed the starting point for many similar speculations. His writings are remarkable in various respects, although, on account of the polemical warmth with which, as one pleading pro domo, he argued his cause, they had no marked influence on scientific thought.[119]
This privilege was reserved for Westphal. After he had shown the way and thrown open his journal for their publication, new cases appeared in rapid succession. In Italy, also, Ritti, Tamassia, Lombroso, and others began to study these phenomena. In 1882 Charcot and Magnan published in the Archives de Neurologie the first important study which appeared in France concerning sexual inversion and allied sexual perversions. They regarded sexual inversion as an episode (syndrome) in a more fundamental process of hereditary degeneration, and compared it with such morbid obsessions as dipsomania and kleptomania. From a somewhat more medico-legal standpoint, the study of sexual inversion in France was furthered by Brouardel, and still more by Lacassagne, whose stimulating influence at Lyons has produced fruitful results in the work of many pupils.[120]
Of much more importance in the history of the theory of sexual inversion was the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing (born at Mannheim in 1840 and died at Graz in 1902), for many years professor of psychiatry at Vienna University and one of the most distinguished alienists of his time. While active in all departments of psychiatry and author of a famous textbook, from 1877 onward he took special interest in the pathology of the sexual impulse. His Psychopathia Sexualis contained over two hundred histories, not only of sexual inversion but of all other forms of sexual perversion. For many years it was the only book on the subject and it long remained the chief storehouse of facts. It passed through many editions and was translated into many languages (there are two translations in English), enjoying an immense and not altogether enviable vogue.
Krafft-Ebing's methods were open to some objection. His mind was not of a severely critical order. He poured out the new and ever-enlarged editions of his book with extraordinary rapidity, sometimes remodelling them. He introduced new subdivisions from time to time into his classification of sexual perversions, and, although this rather fine-spun classification has doubtless contributed to give precision to the subject and to advance its scientific study, it was at no time generally accepted. Krafft-Ebing's great service lay in the clinical enthusiasm with which he approached the study of sexual perversions. With the firm conviction that he was conquering a great neglected field of morbid psychology which rightly belongs to the physician, he accumulated without any false shame a vast mass of detailed histories, and his reputation induced sexually abnormal individuals in all directions to send him their autobiographies, in the desire to benefit their fellow-sufferers.
It is as a clinician, rather than as a psychologist, that we must regard Krafft-Ebing. At the outset he considered inversion to be a functional sign of degeneration, a partial manifestation of a neuropathic and psychopathic state which is in most cases hereditary. This perverse sexuality appears spontaneously with the developing sexual life, without external causes, as the individual manifestation of an abnormal modification of the vita sexualis, and must then be regarded as congenital; or it develops as a result of special injurious influences working on a sexuality which had at first been normal, and must then be regarded as acquired. Careful investigation of these so-called acquired cases, however, Krafft-Ebing in the end finally believed, would indicate that the predisposition consists in a latent homosexuality, or at least bisexuality, which requires for its manifestation the operation of accidental causes. In the last edition of his work Krafft-Ebing was inclined to regard inversion as being not so much a degeneration as a variation, a simple anomaly, and acknowledged that his opinion thus approximated to that which had long been held by inverts themselves.[121]