Psychopathia sexualis: With especial reference to contrary sexual instinct: A medico-legal studyKrafft-Ebing, R. von (Richard)
Science
Psychopathia sexualis: With especial reference to contrary sexual instinct: A medico-legal study
Krafft-Ebing, R. von (Richard)
Paraphilias
Patient is destitute of moral and social feelings. His writings
disclose incredible frivolity and vulgarity. His knowledge is of a
wide range, but his logic is peculiarly distorted. There is no trace
of emotionality. He treats everything (even the sublime) with
incomparable cynicism and irony. He pleads for the justification of
suicide with false philosophical premises and conclusions, and, as one
would speak of the most indifferent affair, he declares that he
intends to accomplish it. He regrets that his penknife has been taken
from him. If he had it he would open his veins as Seneca did,—in the
bath. A short time before a friend had given him, instead of a poison
as he supposed, a cathartic. Instead of having been a means to send
him to the other world, it had sent him to the water-closet. Only the
Great Operator could eradicate his foolish and fatal idea by removing
his senses, etc.
The patient has a large, rhombic, distorted skull, the left half of
the forehead being flatter than the right. The occiput is very
straight. Ears far back, widely projecting, and the external meatus
forms a narrow slit. Genitals very lax; testicles unusually soft and
small.
Now and then the patient suffers with onomatomania. He is compelled to
think of the most useless problems and give up to an interminable
distressing and worrying thought; and is so fatigued after it that he
is no longer capable of any rational thought. After some months the
patient was sent home unimproved. There he spent his time in reading
and frivolities, and busied himself with the thought of founding a new
Christianity, because Christ had been subject to grand delusions and
had deceived the world with wonders (!). After remaining at home some
years the sudden occurrence of a maniacal outbreak brought him again
to the asylum. He presented a mixture of primordial delirium of
persecution (devil, anti-christ, persecution, poisoning, persecutory
voices) and delusions of grandeur (Christ, redemption of the world),
with impulsive, incoherent actions. After five months there was a
remission of this intercurrent acute mental disease, and the patient
returned to the level of his original intellectual peculiarity and
moral defect.
Case 9. E., aged 30, journeyman-painter, was arrested while trying to
cut off the scrotum of a boy he had caught in the woods. He gave as a
motive for this act that he wished to cut into it in order that the
world should not multiply. Often in his youth, with like purpose, he
had cut into his own genitals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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