The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Pop Psychopathy -- (Chapter VIII, Part 5)

With dirt-dishing like that, 'Sexual Psychopathy' soon became a medical bestseller, despite many opinionmakers frowning on its populist appeal.

Here was a top psychiatrist and society doctor, a stout, patrician Catholic in the staid university town of Graz (aka Pension-opolis)—a devoted husband and father of three—who had made it his life's work to catalogue perversity in 'the minutest and the most nauseous detail.'

As The British Medical Journal remarked: 'Better if it had been written entirely in Latin, and thus veiled in the decent obscurity of a dead language.'

Like Aretino's Positions, The Kama Sutra, and the rediscovered erotica of Pompeii, Krafft-Ebing's work introduced more than a few readers to practices they'd never thought of before: ironically, his Psychopathia Sexualis popularized some of the 'psychopathic' behavior it sought to cure.

At the same time, though, the book provided solace to sexual outsiders.

'By publishing his patients' letters and autobiographies, Krafft-Ebing enabled voices to be heard that were usually silenced,' writes his Dutch biographer, who recently uncovered the doctor's archive in Graz.

Professor Harry Oosterhuis cites a lesbian novel from Austria in 1901, in which one of the lovers yearns to tell a couple of male scoffers that 'We also belong to these "Krafft-Ebing people"! I think that they would have fainted!'

ENTER THE MASOCHISTS

Krafft-Ebing was intrigued by one group of 'perverts' in particular: men who yearned to be whipped and humiliated by women.

Rousseau had written about the joys of a good flogging in his Confessions, and many old codgers knew the trick as a way to get blood flowing to their todgers.

But the fantasies of Krafft-Ebing's correspondents represented something different: the flip side of sadism.

A thirty-five-year-old recounted how he'd always been excited by the idea of slavery: as a teenager, he'd had erections while reading Uncle Tom's Cabin (not the effect Harriet Beecher Stowe had in mind).

A German count confessed to paying prostitutes to kick him and make him lick their feet.

And another correspondent traced the worship of imperious women back to the troubadours.

What these gluttons for punishment had in common, though, was their praise for the pervy oeuvre of a contemporary novelist who happened to live in the same Austrian city as Krafft-Ebing.

In fact, his dad was the police chief of Graz.