Introduction: The Need of Sexual Medicine in Contemporary Psychiatry and the Need of Psychiatry in the Growing Field of Sexual Medicine

Abstract

It is written in the annals of history: Sexology is born in the psychiatric land. In the modern era, the first great scholars dealing with the function—and dysfunction—of human sexuality were just the doctors of the mind. Two features characterized the first sexologists: being psychiatrists and working in a German milieu. This was the case of the noble Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (Fig. 1.1), who wrote the bible of the field, the Psychopathia Sexualis (Psychopathy of Sex), of Magnus Hirschfeld, who edited in 1908 the first scientific journal, Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft (Journal for Sexual Research) [1], and it was the case of Felix Abraham, Iwan Bloch, Arthur Kronfeld, Albert Moll, and Bernard Schapiro, who together built a sexual theory which was universally considered a genuine part of psychiatry. That time was also the belle époque of the great psychodynamic theories and research of Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalysis [2]. This glorious period was well represented by the Berliner Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research), dramatically destroyed in 1933 by the collective folly of Nazism.