Krafft Ebing Quotes

I have fooled life and life has fooled me. We are quits. I say good-bye. Think sometimes in the hour of happiness of your poor, comical fool who loved you truly and so well.

All my joys resemble more a momentary intoxication than the real gold of happiness. It was all but an illusion.

The thought of a comedy with paid prostitutes always seemed so silly and purposeless, for a person hired by me could never take the place of my imagination of a 'cruel mistress'.

He soon recognized the fact that the stimulus proceeded from the idea to be in the power of a woman rather than from the act of violence itself.

I have also fantasised myself to be his female slave, but this does not suffice, for after all every woman can be the slave of her husband.

Nature has made a mistake in the choice of my sexuality and I must do a life-long penance for it, for the moral power to suffer the unavoidable with dignity is lost.

There are men who have themselves whipped simply to increase their sexual pleasure. These, in contrast with true masochists, regard flagellation as a means to an end.

All our hope rests upon the possibility of a change of the laws which concern it, so that only rape or the comission of public offence, when this can be proved at the same time, shall be punishable.

How deep congenital sex-inversion roots may be gathered from the fact that the pleasure-dream of the male Urning has to do with male persons, and of the female with females.

He loved to eat rats and cats.

Thus masochism and sadism appear as the fundamental forms of psychosexual perversion, which may make their appearance at any point in the domain of sexual aberration.

Occasionally people make the mistake of asking me where a word comes from. They never make this mistake twice. I am naturally a stern and silent fellow; even forbidding. But there’s something about etymology and where words come from that overcomes my inbuilt taciturnity. A chap once asked me where the word biscuit came from. He was eating one at the time and had been struck by curiosity. I explained to him that a biscuit is cooked twice, or in French bi-cuit, and he thanked me for that. So I added that the bi in biscuit is the same bi that you get in bicycle and bisexual, to which he nodded. And then, just because it occurred to me, I told him that the word bisexual wasn’t invented until the 1890s and that it was coined by a psychiatrist called Richard von Krafft-Ebing and did he know that Ebing also invented the word masochism? He told me firmly that he didn’t. Did he know about Mr. Masoch, after whom masochism was named? He was a novelist and… The fellow told me that he didn’t know about Mr. Masoch, that he didn’t want to know about Mr. Masoch, and that his one ambition in life was to eat his biscuit in peace.

It is the sad privilege of medicine, and especially that of psychiatry, to ever witness the weaknesses of human nature and the reverse side of life.

he mentions that boys being spanked may experience incidental penile sensations (if held face down across the lap of the adult, or simply from friction against their own trousers), and consequently come to associate erotic pleasure with spanking, leading to a spanking fetish, and perhaps in some cases to sadism or masochism.

Religious fetichism finds its original motive in the delusion that its object, i.e., the idol, is not a mere symbol, but possesses divine attributes, and ascribes to it peculiar wonder-working (relics) or protective (amulets) virtues.

Krafft-Ebing was [...], essentially, the first doctor to start writing case histories of people whose sexual behaviour wasn’t entirely respectable. The book that resulted, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), was so scandalous that large chunks of it had to be written in Latin, in order to keep it out of the hands of the prurient public. The idea was that if you were clever enough to understand Latin, you couldn’t possibly be a pervert (something that nobody mentioned to Caligula).

Richard Von Krafft-Ebing was a German-Austrian psychiatrist and one of the founders of scientific sexology. He became a proponent of the sickness model of homosexuality and believed that treatment came from the prevention of masturbating.

Contrary to my own misconceptions, it turns out that serial killers have been around for as long as there have been people—neither the modern world nor America is to blame. After discussing the well-known case of Jack the Ripper, Dr. von Krafft-Ebing discusses the far lesser known Vacher the Ripper, who stalked the French countryside in the late 1800s, murdering perhaps two dozen people. He would rape, strangle, and mutilate his victims, who included girls, women, and boys. It was said that he was born “of honourable parents and belonged to a mentally sound family. He never had a severe illness, [and] was from his earliest infancy vicious, lazy and shy of work.

Only Ruth Handler dared blur the line between fetish and toy, taking an object familiar to readers of Krafft-Ebing and recasting it for readers of Mother Goose.

It was the same with Elizabeth of Genton. As a result of whipping she actually passed into a state of bacchanalian madness. As a rule, she raved when, excited by unusual flagellation, she believed herself united with her “ideal.” This condition was so exquisitely pleasant to her that she would frequently cry out, “O love, O eternal love, O love, O you creatures! cry out with me: ‘Love, Love!

There are some nations, viz., the Persians and Russians, where the women regard blows as a peculiar sign of love and favour.

Almost every masturbator at last reaches a point where, frightened on learning the results of the vice, or on experiencing them (neurasthenia), or led by example or seduction to the opposite sex, he wishes to free himself of the vice and re-instate his sexual life.

His father was an epileptic, and his sister was an imbecile.

The result of this marriage was, after five years, two children, and a collection of seventy-two wigs.

CASE 116. L., aged thirty-seven, clerk, from tainted family, had his first erection at five years, when he saw his bed-fellow—an aged relative—put on his night-cap.

When looking out of a window, he became dizzy and anxious. He was a perverse, peculiar, and easily embarrassed man, of bad mental constitution.

The majority of homosexuals are happy in their perverse sexual feeling and impulse, and unhappy only in so far as social and legal barriers stand in the way of the satisfaction of their instinct towards their own sex.

In homosexuals morally perverse and potent, in regard to erections, the sexual desire is satisfied by pederasty—an act, however, which is repugnant to perverted individuals that are not defective morally, much in the same way as it is to normal men.

Dancing with a woman is unpleasant to a homosexual, but to dance with a man, especially one with an attractive form, is to him the greatest of pleasures.

CASE 146. Once summer's evening, at twilight, X.Y., a doctor of medicine in a North German city, was trodden on by a watchman as he (the doctor) was committing an immoral act with a tramp on a path in a field. He was practicing masturbation on him and thereupon putting the tramp's penis into his mouth.

The condition of the anus indicated passive pederasty.

The chief reason why inverted sexuality in woman is still covered with the veil of mystery is that the homosexual act so far as woman is concerned, does not fall under the law.

On cite souvent les cas de Henri III et de Henri IV de France, qui auraient été pris d’une passion subite et irrésistible pour des femmes dont üs avaient senti les vêtements intimes ; dans le cas de Henri III, on dit que sa passion, née ainsi, pour Marie de Qèves, à survécu à la mort tragique de celle-d. Cf. R. von Krafft-Ebing, PsychopaOtia Sexualis, Stuttgart '®, p. 25. Lorsque cet auteur doute (p. 18) que des effets de ce genre liés aux centres olfactifs puissent se vérifier « chez des individus normaux », il identifie évidemment les individus normaux à ceux qui ont une sensibilité « subtile » assez réduite. Ploss-Baitels (Op. cil., vol. I, p. 467 sq) font allusion à des croyances populaires selon lesquelles l’odeur du corps (nous dirions : de l’être) d’une personne peut avoir un effet intoxicant sur une autre personne, si celle-ci est de sexe opposé.

He loved solitude, for fear that others might find out his sexual abnormality.

He preferred a hard, rough hand.

Masturbation should be carefully watched in both sexes.

She said she had always been indifferent towards men. In fact, she avoided balls.

The first psychiatrist to look closely at the more extreme forms of sadistic behavior was the eminent German physician Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Besides coining the term “masochism” (named after the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose famous novel, Venus in Furs, deals with a man who craves humiliation), Krafft-Ebing made a major contribution to the literature of morbid psychology with his classic book, Psychopathia Sexualis—a massive compendium of every known perversion, illustrated with hundreds of detailed case histories. At the time of its initial publication in 1886, the book was considered so shocking that its author was nearly expelled from the prestigious British Medico-Psychological Association. Even today, it makes for deeply disturbing reading. Still, it is a significant work, one that clearly demonstrates there’s nothing new about serial murder. Of course, Krafft-Ebing doesn’t use the term “serial murder,” which wouldn’t enter the language for another hundred years. The term he uses is the German word lustmord or “lust-murder.” The essence of this crime is extreme sadistic violence against the victim. The lust-murderer doesn’t just kill his victims. His ultimate pleasure comes from savaging their bodies: disemboweling them, cutting out their genitals, etc. For such blood-crazed sadists, violence is a substitute for sex.

Next to Krafft-Ebing, the psychiatrist who made the most detailed study of sadistic behavior was one of Freud’s former colleagues, Dr. Wilhelm Stekel. Stekel’s two-volume, 1929 work, Sadism and Masochism, contains dozens of extraordinary case histories: men and women in thrall to the most extreme, and often appalling, sexual aberrations.

Krafft-Ebing was disposed to regard all cases in which a scatalogical sexual attraction existed as due to "latent masochism.

But he [Arthur Benson] does not use the word 'homosexual' until the last year of his life, 1925, more than thirty years after Richard Krafft-Ebing or Henry Havelock Ellis began to make the term familiar.

The implication was that a cure might be the mental equivalent of amputating a healthy limb. Some patients seemed to need nothing but encouragement to regain their health. As one of Krafft-Ebing’s early patients exclaimed: ‘Ever since I gave free rein to my Uranian nature, I have been happier, healthier and more productive!