Controversial for decades, now finally back in print, this classic 19th-century work on so-called sexual deviation is the pioneering collection of case studies that cataloged and defined perversion--from fetishism to incest to homosexuality and much more. Informative and entertaining, PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS is considered one of the most important documents in humankind's modern efforts to understand itself.
This first major study of a curiously neglected term in the history of sexuality will intrigue students, scholars and enthusiasts alike. The authors take us through a journey across four centuries, showing how notions of sexual coldness and frigidity have been thought about by legal, medical, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and literary writers.
Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-forensic Study, Twelfth Edition deals with the psychology of deviant sexual behavior. The book discusses the psychology and the physiology of sexual life including anthropological conditions such as Gynecomasty. The author describes general pathology including anesthesia sexualis (absence of sexual feeling), hyperesthesia (abnormally increased sexual desire), paraesthesia (perversion), masochism, sadism, fetishism, and antipathic sexuality. The author also examines homosexuality (as abnormal congenital manifestation), effimination, and androgyny. Special pathology includes the manifestations of abnormal sexual life in various forms and states of mental disturbance. The author discusses dementia, epilepsy, periodic insanity, nymphomania, and satyriasis. He also addresses pathological sexuality and its legal aspects that cover acts of rape, murder with rape, sodomy, cultivated pederasty, lesbian love, incest, necrophilia, or immoral acts on persons under care. The book also contains some case histories that illustrate such deviant sexual behavior. This book can interest behavioral scientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, students and professors in the sciences of human sexuality and behavior.
"With Heinrich Kaan's book we have then what could be called the date of birth, or in any case the date of the emergence, of sexuality and sexual aberrations in the psychiatric field." Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975. Heinrich Kaan's fascinating work—part medical treatise, part sexual taxonomy, part activist statement, and part anti-onanist tract—takes us back to the origins of sexology. He links the sexual instinct to the imagination for the first time, creating what Foucault called "a unified field of sexual abnormality." Kaan's taxonomy consists of six sexual aberrations: masturbation, pederasty, lesbian love, necrophilia, bestiality, and the violation of statues. Kaan not only inaugurated the field of sexology, but played a significant role in the regimes of knowledge production and discipline about psychiatric and sexual subjects. As Benjamin Kahan argues in his Introduction, Kaan's text crucially enables us to see how homosexuality replaced masturbation as the central concern of Euro-American sexual regulation. Kaan's work (translated into English for the first time here) opens a new window onto the history of sexuality and the history of sexology and reconfigures our understanding of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's book of the same name, published some forty years later.
Pain, while known to almost everyone, is not universal. The evidence of our own pain, and our own experience, does not provide us with automatic insight into the pains of others, past or present. No matter how self-evident and ubiquitous the sting of a paper cut or the desolation of heartbreak might seem, pain is situated and historically specific. In a work that is sometimes personal, always political, Rob Boddice reveals a history of pain that juggles many disciplinary approaches and disparate languages to tackle the thorniest challenges in pain research. He explores the shifting meaning-making processes that produce painful experiences, expanding the world of pain to take seriously the relationship between pain’s physicality and social and emotional suffering. Ranging from antiquity to the present and taking in pain knowledge and pain experiences from around the world, his tale encompasses not only injury, but also grief, exclusion, chronic pain, and trauma, and reveals how knowledge claims about pain occupy what pain is like. Innovative and compassionate in equal measure, Knowing Pain puts forward an original pain agenda that is essential reading for those interested in the history of emotions, senses, and experience, for medical researchers and practitioners, and for anyone who has known pain.
