Description
Book SynopsisWith 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, 19741975.
Heinrich Kaan''s fascinating workpart medical treatise, part sexual taxonomy, part activist statement, and part anti-onanist tracttakes 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 ho
Trade Review
The liminal status of the first Psychopathia Sexualis—its position near the end of a centuries-old mode of scholarly discourse and at the inauguration of a new disciplinary organization of knowledge—render Kaan's project interesting now in ways that it couldn’t be for its contemporary audience. What’s striking here—especially given the text is written in a language with liturgical and theological associations—is that Kaan begins and remains on a strictly naturalistic level of description and explanation. Kaan’s work had some important implications. It treated human sexuality as entirely explicable within nature—with nonprocreative forms being, in effect, the accidental effect of a natural force being redirected via the brain.
-- Scott McLemee * Inside Higher Ed *
In the preface to his two-part treatise, Kaan states that his intentions are to call physicians' attention to the condition he terms "sexual madness," caused by a "diseased imagination," and to attempt to correct publicly held errors and misunderstandings.... This translated text has much to offer those who are interested in the history of sexology, the scientific method, and the social construction of gender. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above; researchers and faculty.
-- P. Lefler, Bluegrass Community & Technical College * CHOICE *
