Abstract
We announced in the previous chapter that we were going to use the moral–physical opposition as a conceptual entrée into psychological treatments of frigidity as they developed at the very end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth. We will begin that task by considering some new terms that maintained a version of the dichotomy while also reshaping and reconceiving it. The emergence of such expressions was quite a widespread discursive event, affecting at least the three languages — French, English and German — on which we are focused in these two chapters. We have already had occasion to discuss William Hammond’s use of ‘mental’ rather than ‘moral’ in certain contexts, and will soon come to consider in detail some significant terminological developments in German, but before doing so we will consider briefly the professional discourse of a later French alienist, Henri Legrand du Saulle.
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Notes
[Henri] Legrand du Saulle, Les Hystériques. Etat physique et état mental. Actes insolites délictueux et criminels (Paris: Baillière, 1883).
Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 245.
Ian R. Dowbiggin, Inheriting Madness: Professionalization and Psychiatric Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), 31.
Félix Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité chez l’homme et la femme, 3rd edn (Paris: Baillière, 1876), 352.
Heike Bauer, ‘“Not a Translation but a Mutilation”: The Limits of Translation and the Discipline of Sexology’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 16 (2003): 381–405, considers a translation of Krafft-Ebing’s text by F. J. Rebman that was first published in 1892. She speaks of cultural transposition and transformation of the German original, rather than simple inaccuracy. We have based our own translated quotations on a more recent version by
Franklin S. Klaf — Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct. A Medico-Forensic Study (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998) — but have nonetheless felt the need to question and modify that translation in turn. In doing so, we have referred to the following German edition:
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (Munich: Matthes and Seitz, 1997).
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 45–6.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 45.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 45.
See Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 40.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 40.
Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 103.
A. von Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion in Psychopathia Sexualis (Pathological Manifestations of the Sexual Sense), with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct, trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock (Philadelphia: Davis; London: Rebman, 1895), 146.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 45. The published translation is inaccurate at this point, possibly because the translator did not understand the reference to Zacchia. See 182 and 262 for other references to Zacchia. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing actually uses a wider range of terms that are sourced to Zacchia: not only naturae frigidae, but also impotentia coeundi and impotentia generandi. See Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 78–9.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 41–2.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 232.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 263.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 232; translation modified.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 323; original emphasis.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 323; original emphasis.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 45.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 234–5. For some comparable cases, see 236, 239, 276–8.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 294.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 299. The translation has been modified because in this passage it translates both ‘psychisch’ and ‘moralisch’ as ‘mental’, which should in fact correspond to geistig, thus eliding the differences between three key terms.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 299; translation modified. Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, 119, observes that ‘from 1886 on, Krafft-Ebing and his assistants began to use hypnosis and the so-called “psychical therapy”, not only in the treatment of neurotic, neurasthenic, and hysteric patients in his sanatorium, but also when treating the perverts who consulted him in his private practice’.
Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion in Psychopathia Sexualis (Pathological Manifestations of the Sexual Sense), with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct, trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock (Philadelphia: Davis; London: Rebman, 1895). The original German edition was Die Suggestionstherapie des Geschlechtsinnes, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1892).
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 3. Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, Love and Pain, The Sexual Impulse in Women, 2nd edn, revised and enlarged (Philadelphia: Davis, 1923), 203. Hammond made a contribution to this discussion as early as 1887. Speaking of married women in America, he said: ‘it is doubtful if in one-tenth of the instances of intercourse they experience the slightest pleasurable sensation from first to last. The virtuous married woman submits passively and is impotent.’ William A. Hammond, Sexual Impotence in the Male and Female (Detroit: Davis, 1887), 300.
Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003)
and Elizabeth Stephens, ‘Coining Spermatorrhoea: Medicine and Male Body Fluids, 1836–66’, Sexualities 12 (2009): 469–87.
Diderot A et al., Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–80; repr., Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann, 1995), article ‘Fureur utérine’.
Cesare Lombroso and G. Ferrero, La Femme criminelle et la prostituée, trans. Louise Meille (Paris: Alcan, 1896), 51.
Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 112.
Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 458.
Ambroise Tardieu, Manuel de pathologie et de clinique médicales, 3rd edn (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1865), 524.
Jules Guyot, Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental. Méditations sur le mariage selon la physiologie du genre humain (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1882), 24.
Dr Caufeynon, L’Impuissance et la stérilité chez l’homme et la femme (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Médicale, [1902–03]), 67.
Dr Désormeaux, L’Impuissance et la stérilité (Paris: Librairie P. Fort, L. Chaubard, Successeur, 1905–07), 47.
See, for example, Dr Eynon, Manuel de l’amour conjugal (c. 1909; Paris: Librairie artistique et Edition parisienne réunies, 1924), 129: ‘Many physiologists have said that woman, even in normal health, often suffers from frigidity. That fact cannot reasonably be denied, but we are persuaded that such anaphrodisia is only accidental and, so to speak, artificial.’
The first edition of this book is quite rare. We have been able to consult only the third edition, Otto Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes (Berlin: H. Kornfeld, 1919). In it, Adler engages with psychoanalytical work, notably that of Wilhelm Stekel, which had not yet appeared in 1904.
Elizabeth Grosz sums up Irigaray’s position in Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 133: ‘The so-called “frigid woman” is precisely the woman whose pleasures do not fit neatly into the male-defined structure of sexual pleasure.’
Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (London: The Women’s Press, 1990), 1.
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 6. Sex in Relation to Society, (Philadelphia: Davis, 1928), 550.
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 4. Sexual Selection in Man (Philadelphia: Davis, 1905), 40.
Dr Horace Stapfer, La Kinésithérapie gynécologique, traitement des maladies des femmes par le massage et la gymnastique (Système de Brandt) (Paris: Masson, 1899), 23.
Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria’, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
Wilhelm Stekel, Die Geschlechtskälte der Frau: Eine Psychopathologie des weiblichen Liebeslebens (Berlin, Vienna: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1920). The German edition we consulted dates from 1921.
Wilhelm Stekel, Disorders of the Instincts and the Emotions. The Parapathiac Disorders. Frigidity in Woman, 2 vols (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926). Authorized English version by James S. van Teslaar, I, 2.
W[ilhelm] Stekel, Conditions of Nervous Anxiety and Their Treatment, introduction by Samuel Lowy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1923) [Routledge reprint], vi.
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© 2011 Peter Cryle and Alison Moore
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Cryle, P., Moore, A. (2011). Treatment 2: Psychology. In: Frigidity. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337039_8
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