Magyar László szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 166-169. (Budapest, 1999)

TANULMÁNYOK — ARTICLES - Porter, Roy: Perversion in the past. — Perverzió a múltban

were primarily act-oriented. Pre-modern sexual thinking had no need for subtle labelling of different varietis of sexual actors, beyond terms like rake or libertine for those carrying erotic activity to excess.

11 Fin de siècle sexologists did not abandon the time-honoured normative distinction between procreative sexual acts and the rest, but they felt bound to re-establish it on foundations that appeared not moralistic but medico-scientific; indeed not just anatomical or gynaecological but psychological. As may be seen from works like Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), assorted interlocking strategies were followed. A bulky bestiary of sexual transgressions was compiled, ranging from adultery to zooerasty, by way of bestiality, coprolagnia, exhibitionism, fetishism, flagellation, frottage, sado-masochism, satyriasis, transvestism, urolagnia, voyeurism and a hundred other christened perversions, including male and female homosexuality. The assumption was that all such acts were deviant, because symptomatic of a certain psychopathological type; in other words, irregular eroticism was the expression of character weakness or psychological abnormality. Aberrant sexuality was not just a whim or taste, but evidence of deeper disturbance: disorders of the individual, disorders of the era, disorders of the race. Sexual deviants, experts argued, were decadent individuals living in degenerate times. The evils of the epoch — luxury, ennui, alcohol, over-stimulus, stress, strains and satiety — would predispose individuals to degeneracy.

12 So would inherited factors and constitutional weaknesses. In his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Havelock Ellis thus pointed to "inborn constitutional abnormality"; others spoke of neuropaths and psychopaths suffering from congenital defects of constitution and hereditary degeneration, manifest in disorders of the central nervous system. But personal vices played their part.

13 In Krafft-Ebing's view, perverse sex was normal sex taken to pantomimic extremes by feeble individuals lacking self-control. Thus sadism and masochism replicated normal and healthy patterns of male dominance and female submission, only to a grotesque degree. Overall, the discourse of deviant sex in the fin de siècle characteristically blended the veneer of science (medical analysis not moral verdicts: perverts were sick not wicked) with thundering judgmentalism. Psychosexual texts around 1900 teem with a degenerationist paradigm of perversion. Discussing aetiology, Leonardo Bianchi 's A Text-Book of Psychiatry, which appeared in Italian in 1905, being translated into English the next year, thus maintains, leaning on the authority of Krafft-Ebing and Moll, that "the gravest forms of sexual perversion are cer11 See Porter, R.: "The literature of sexual advice before 1800", in Porter R., Teich M. (eds): Sexual knowledge, sexual science: the history of attitudes to sexuality (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), Boucé, P. G. (ed): Sexuality in eighteenth century Britain (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1982); Wagner, P.: Eros revived: erotica in the age of enlightenment (London, Seeker & Wartburg, 1986). 12 Pick, D.: Faces of degeneration: aspects of an European disorder c. 1848—1918 (Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1989); Dowbiggin, I.: Inheriting madness: Professionalization and psychiatric knowledge in nineteenth-century France (Berkeley, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1991). 13 Ellis, H.: Studies in the psychology of sex. vol. 2. Sexual inversion (Philadelphia, Davis, 1915), If; for evaluation, see Brome, V.: Havelock Ellis philosopher of sex (Manchester, Carcanet, 1979); Robinson, P. A.: The modernization of sex: havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson (London, Harper & Row, 1976; Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1989). A particularly good analysis of the range of options available within this broad paradigm is offered by Frank Sulloway in his Freud, biologist of the mind: beyond the psychoanalytic legend (New York, Basic Books, 1979; London, Burnett Books, 1979), ch. 8, "Freud and the sexolosigst".