Apparatus XY

11Due to the psychiatric profession's vulnerability in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Krafft-Ebing's publication of Psychopathia Sexualis brought a new kind of legitimacy and independency to the psychiatric establishment, and correspondingly expanded its professional authority and cultural status in a novel way. "Before the 1860s," according to historian Harry Oosterhuis, "medical interest in disorderly sexual conduct was intrinsically linked to forensic medicine that focused on criminal acts such as rape and sodomy" (38). Over the course of the nineteenth century, physicians who were interested in sexual deviance changed from describing "mental and nervous disorders [as] the result of 'unnatural' acts" to viewing them as the "cause of sexual aberrations" (Oosterhuis 43, emphasis original). Being the first exhaustive compilation of different categories of sexual perversion, Krafft-Ebing's masterpiece construed sexual pathology as a realm of medical specialization that belonged exclusively to psychiatrists, particularly those with a forensic interest. Recognizing that the publication of Psychopathia Sexualis provided a definitive opportunity for claiming an unprecedented kind of medical specialty and therapeutic authority, psychiatrists across Europe and the United States immediately responded by discussing, supporting, and quoting from this encyclopedic contribution in their own writings. In initiating the proliferation of new medical vocabularies of erotic deviance in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, Kafft-Ebing's monument not only provided psychiatrists a new type of professional identity, competence, and power, but also granted sexuality a mental-pathological characterization for the first time in history.[14]For a list of new sexual vocabularies developed in the final decades of the nineteenth century, see Oosterhuis, pp. 44-5.

12In order to promote the legitimacy of their new expertise in sexual psychopathology, and of their status in the medical profession more generally, psychiatrists needed to demonstrate the credibility of such an enterprise. It was under this condition that in explaining homosexuality Krafft-Ebing appropriated the psychiatric theory of degeneration first posited by Morel in Treatise on the Physical, Intellectual, and Moral Degeneration of Human Species (1857), the wide circulation of which was further amplified by the appearance of Charles Darwin's The Origins of Species two years later; and it was also in this context that Krafft-Ebing's degenerationist interpretation of homosexuality subsequently gained tremendous popular support in both Europe and the United States. As mentioned earlier, most somatic approaches to mental illness failed to yield results that satisfied mental health practitioners near the end of the nineteenth century. Given that cerebral localizations of psychological disorders remained unfruitful, most psychiatrists on both sides of the Atlantic, especially in France, turned to hereditary explanations that resonated with Darwin's evolutionary ideas. This strategic alignment with the highly esteemed, state-of-the-art biological theory enabled mental health experts to secure a more scientific and credible image for their profession.

13To establish the credibility of their expertise, in turn, required psychiatrists to embody and demonstrate a sense of scientific progress in their work. This effort was evident, for example, in the revision process of Krafft-Ebing's influential volume. In no more than six pages of the seventh edition of Psychopathia Sexualis (1892, 225-30), Krafft-Ebing reviewed a small number of etiological theories of homosexuality offered by other experts and posited his own hypothesis:

An explanation of congenital contrary sexual feeling may perhaps be found in the fact that it represents a peculiarity bred in descendants, but arising in ancestry. The hereditary factor might be an acquired abnormal inclination for the same sex in the ancestors (v. infra), found fixed as a congenital abnormal manifestation in the descendants. Since, according to experience, acquired physical and mental peculiarities, not simply improvements, but essentially defects, are transmitted, this hypothesis becomes tenable. Since individuals affected with contrary sexual feeing not infrequently beget children,-at least, they are not absolutely impotent (women never are),-a transmission to descendants is possible.(228, emphasis original)

It is worth emphasizing that in the early editions of his monograph, Krafft-Ebing framed his degeneration theory of homosexuality in a remarkably reserved tone. His "hypothesis" became "tenable" under specific conditions, and the idea that individuals inherited homosexual feelings from their parents was only "possible" at best.

14By the time the revised and enlarged twelfth edition appeared in 1903, Krafft-Ebing had expanded this section of his text to roughly thirteen pages (1933, 338-50). In addition to presenting case studies shorter in length but greater in numbers throughout his new edition, Krafft-Ebing asserted his degeneration theory of homosexuality more forcefully and supported it more consistently. Under the same section from which the previous quote was cited, he now devoted seven pages to dismiss other explanations of homosexuality that did not fit his degenerationist framework, and the rest of the thirteen pages to make the case that homosexuality was nothing but the manifestation of a hereditary "organic taint."

If the structure of this opinion is continued, the following anthropological and historical facts may be involved:
1. The sexual apparatus consists of (a) the sexual glands and the organs of reproduction; (b) the spinal centres, which act either as a check or a stimulus upon (a); (c) the cerebral regions, in which the psychical processes of the vita sexualis are enacted.
2. The tendency of nature in the present stage of evolution is the reproduction of monosexual individuals, and the law of experience teaches that the cerebral centre is normally developed which corresponds with the sexual glands ("Law of the Sexual Homologous Development").
3. This destruction of antipathic sexuality is at present not yet completed.
4. Besides, a long line of clinical and anthropological facts favour this assumption.
5. These manifestations of inverted sexuality are evidently found only in persons with organic taint. (345-7, emphasis original)

Although I have necessarily compressed three pages of text into the above quotation, what I hope to show here is that after eleven revisions of Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing had become more stringent with respect to his degenerationist position and invested much more organizational effort in maintaining the claim that homosexuality was a "defect of the natural laws [that] must…be considered as a manifestation of degeneration" (349).

15Moreover, in the later version of his text, Krafft-Ebing elaborated upon Darwinian evolutionary theory to a significant extent, something that he did not do in the seventh edition. Borrowing Darwinian conceptions allowed Krafft-Ebing to equate homosexuality with evolutionary regression: since homosexual traits blurred the distinction between masculinity and femininity, according to him, homosexual individuals exhibited an unfavorable anatomical and psychological hermaphroditism that resembled the lower end of the evolutionary scale (348). At the same time, Krafft-Ebing reminded his expert readers that "later researches…proceeding on embryological (onto- and phylogenetic) and anthropological lines seem to promise good results" (344). Therefore, situated in a convincing research trajectory, Krafft-Ebing's explanation of homosexuality as a familial degeneration within the Darwinian framework of evolutionary biology represented a more general attempt to render psychiatry as a medical discipline that evidenced scientific progress. By exemplifying elements of scientific advancement, psychiatric specialties such as sexual psychopathology could then be perceived as professionally valid and respectable.