A Problem in Modern Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and JuristsSymonds, John Addington
Philosophy
A Problem in Modern Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists
Symonds, John Addington
Homosexuality
Casper, continues Krafft-Ebing, thoroughly diagnosed the phenomenon.
Griesinger referred it to hereditary affliction. Westphal defined it as
"a congenital inversion of the sexual feeling, together with a
consciousness of its morbidity." Ulrichs explained it by the presence of
a feminine soul in a male body, and gave the name _Urning_[30] to its
subjects. Gley suggested that a female brain was combined with
masculine glands of sex. Magnan hypothesised a woman's brain in a man's
body.
Krafft-Ebing asserts that hardly any of these Urnings are conscious of
morbidity. They look upon themselves as unfortunate mainly because law
and social prejudices stand in the way of their natural indulgence.[31]
He also takes for proved, together with all the authorities he cites,
that the abnormal sexual appetite is constitutional and inborn.
Krafft-Ebing, as might have been expected, refers the phenomenon to
functional degeneration, dependent upon neuropathical conditions in the
patient, which are mainly derived from hereditary affliction.
He confirms the account reported above from Casper as to the platonic or
semi-platonic relations of the Urning with the men he likes, his
abhorrence of coition, and his sexual gratification through acts of
mutual embracement. The number of Urnings in the world, he says, is far
greater than we can form the least conception of from present means of
calculation.
At this point he begins to subdivide the subjects of congenital
inversion. The first class he constitutes are called by him "Psychical
Hermaphrodites." Born with a predominant inclination towards persons of
their own sex, they possess rudimentary feelings of a semi-sexual nature
for the opposite. These people not unfrequently marry; and Krafft-Ebing
supposes that many cases of frigidity in matrimony, unhappy unions, and
so forth, are attributable to the peculiar diathesis of the male--or it
may be, of the female--in these marriages. They are distinguished from
his previous class of "acquired" inversion by the fact that the latter
start with instincts for the other sex, which are gradually obliterated;
whereas the psychical hermaphrodites commence life with an attraction
towards their own sex, which they attempt to overcome by making demands
upon their rudimentary normal instincts. Five cases are given of such
persons.[32]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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