Queer Voices in the Works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, 1883–1901

This book is a critical edition of the autobiographical case studies used by the Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing between 1883 and 1901. Forty-one individual case studies of same-sex attracted men and women, in their own words, made an eye-catching component of Krafft-Ebing’s most important work, PsychopathiaSexualis. Although the psychiatrist probably edited the autobiographical case studies, with the racier passages rendered in rather rudimentary Latin, what is particularly remarkable is that he preserved an unmistakeable queer discourse in some of the case studies that disputed the pathologising ideologies of the psychiatric texts in which they were embedded. 

Most of the autobiographies of same-sex attracted men follow the discursive patterns established in nineteenth-century psychiatry in providing descriptions of body features including genital size and shape, mental and physical health, family histories of health and disease, and accounts of life events from childhood to the present. This was because these men had been following Krafft-Ebing’s works and were now using their autobiographical contributions in Psychopathia Sexualis as a platform for negotiating the parameters of sexual orientation. 

Women’s sexuality was a relatively undeveloped component of Krafft-Ebing’s sexology but there are four case studies of women containing autobiographical content. Similarly, gender variance was hardly differentiated from sexuality at this period, but there are three autobiographies that clearly articulate cross gender identification, anticipating the future categories of transsexual and transgender. 

Krafft-Ebing reserved his therapeutic interventions to those individuals attracted to both sexes where hypnosis could supress same sex urges. Seven of these individuals supplied sexual autobiographies with two of them undergoing treatment as part of the overall case study. 

Together, these forty-one accounts give the reader a window into queer self-conceptions in Austria and Germany as the nineteenth century drew to a close.