Richard von Krafft-Ebing: The Man Who Named Desire
Two of the most widely used words in the modern vocabulary of sex were fixed in place by an Austrian baron in a Graz asylum. He took masochism from the novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and made it a clinical term; he took sadism from existing French usage and attached it to the pathology he saw in the Marquis de Sade's books. He also put homosexuality, bisexuality and necrophilia into circulation. Almost everything he believed about those categories has since been rejected, and almost nobody has been able to stop using his words.
A Baron's Son in Baden
Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, known as von Ebing, was born on 14 August 1840 in the Grand Duchy of Baden, the eldest of five children. His father held high office in the Baden government; his mother descended from Carl Joseph Anton Mittermaier, the celebrated Heidelberg legal scholar. The paternal line had been ennobled by Empress Maria Theresia in 1770 and raised to baronial rank by Emperor Franz II in 1805. The legal inheritance on his mother's side matters: the questions that occupied him most were always where medicine met the criminal law.
He read medicine at Heidelberg, where his grandfather had held a chair in law, joined the Burschenschaft Frankonia in 1858, and passed his state medical examination summa cum laude in 1863 with a dissertation on sensory delusions. He then observed psychiatric practice in Zurich, Vienna, Prague and Berlin, and from 1864 to 1868 worked as an assistant at the Illenau asylum in Baden under Christian Roller and Karl Hergt, the standard apprenticeship of a nineteenth-century alienist.
Field Doctor, Then Professor
He opened a private neurological practice in Baden-Baden in 1868. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 1871 he served as a field doctor with the rank of captain in the Baden Division, then as hospital doctor at the fortress of Rastatt, and afterwards ran an electrotherapeutic station in Baden-Baden treating the nervous injuries of returning soldiers. In 1872 he inaugurated a psychiatric clinic in Strasbourg; in 1873 he was made director of the new Styrian State Asylum Feldhof near Graz and given the chair of psychiatry at the University of Graz, opening his clinic there on 22 May 1874 and leading it until 1880. A full professorship followed in 1885. In 1889 he moved to the Lower Austrian State Asylum in Vienna and a professorship at the university, and in 1892, after Theodor Meynert's death, took over the psychiatric clinic at the Vienna General Hospital, the most prominent such post in the German-speaking world.
Psychopathia Sexualis
The book appeared in 1886 and became the standard nineteenth-century textbook on sexual pathology. Its method was clinical and forensic: not moral argument but accumulated case histories, 238 of them by the twelfth and final edition he supervised. He sorted sexual dysfunction into four cerebral neuroses, paradoxia, anaesthesia, hyperaesthesia and paraesthesia, and he wrote from an explicit premise that now reads as the book's cage: "With opportunity for the natural satisfaction of the sexual instinct, every expression of it that does not correspond with the purpose of nature - i.e., propagation - must be regarded as perverse."
Within that frame he described far more than his contemporaries were willing to look at, including gender nonconformity and the conditions modern medicine calls gender dysphoria, which he labelled metamorphosis sexualis paranoica. English translations by Charles Gilbert Chaddock and others carried his terminology into a language that had lacked it.
Pathology as Defence
His position on homosexuality was the most consequential thing he did, and it was double-edged. He classified it as an inherited neuropsychopathic disorder, which is to say a disease, and then used that classification as a legal shield: if same-sex desire was innate, its bearers carried no moral responsibility for what he called a malformation, and it was not contagious, so criminal punishment was pointless. He corresponded with Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and absorbed the Urning theory of a third sex. Then, unusually for a man of his standing and age, he changed his mind. In an 1901 article in the Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen he reframed homosexuality as a differentiation rather than an anomaly, moving toward acceptance of it as a naturally occurring variation. He died the following year.
Alongside this he pursued conventional psychiatry to high effect, publishing the monograph Die progressive allgemeine Paralyse in 1894 on the neurological ruin caused by late syphilis and delivering a much-admired lecture on it at the International Medical Congress in Moscow in 1897. His Fundamentals of Criminal Psychology and his Textbook of Forensic Psychopathology of 1875 made him one of Europe's most sought-after forensic experts, consulted in Italy, France and Russia.
Why Richard Is Called a Genius
The faculty is taxonomic, and taxonomy is easy to dismiss until you notice that nobody had done it. Before Krafft-Ebing, sexual behaviour outside marriage belonged to theology and the courts; his innovation was to insist it was a matter of clinical evidence, and then to gather that evidence patiently, case by case, until 238 individual histories sat in a single volume where anyone with medical Latin could compare them. Naming is the visible part of that work, and the names have outlasted his theories by more than a century. So has the method: his empirical approach became the foundation on which Magnus Hirschfeld and the later sexologists built. The second, rarer quality is intellectual honesty. A professor at the summit of Viennese medicine revised his central classification of homosexuality in his final year of life, in a specialist journal, in the direction of accepting what he had spent decades calling a disease. Very few authorities of that era corrected themselves at all.
The counter-case is severe and now dominant. His governing premise, that any sexuality not aimed at procreation is by definition perverse, converted enormous ranges of ordinary human behaviour into illness, and the medicalisation of gender nonconformity that he pioneered supplied a diagnostic apparatus later used to control and treat people who needed neither. Classifying is not explaining; his theories of heredity and degeneration were wrong, and Freud's psychological account swiftly overshadowed his conclusions. The fairest verdict is that he was a great observer trapped inside a bad theory, and that his lasting contribution is a vocabulary and a method rather than a body of truths.
Legacy
Krafft-Ebing was elected to the Leopoldina in 1886, the year Psychopathia Sexualis appeared. The Austrian Catholic Church turned against him when he linked the desire for martyrdom and sanctity to hysteria and masochism. He died in Graz on 22 December 1902 after a series of strokes, survived by his wife Maria Luise Kissling, two sons and a daughter, and was buried at St Leonhard Cemetery. An obituary in the Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift remembered "an utterly noble nature" whose "touching kindness and friendliness" toward agitated patients was itself therapeutic. Streets in Vienna, Mannheim and Graz carry his name. So, more consequentially, does every argument about sexuality that still uses the words he chose.
