CHAPTER XVII
In my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” published in the years 1902 and 1903, I for the first time attempted to deal systematically, from the standpoint of the anthropologist and ethnologist, with the great province of the so-called “psychopathia sexualis,” the field of sexual aberrations, degenerations, anomalies, perversities, and perversions. I started from the point of view that, in order to obtain new ideas regarding the nature of psychopathia sexualis, and in order to revise the old ideas in the light of recent knowledge, we must keep before our eyes, not one-sidedly “the sick man,” but comprehensively “man as man,” both as civilized man and as savage man.
Previously the doctrine of psychopathia sexualis had been dominated exclusively by clinical, purely medical conceptions. Observations had been limited to morbid phenomena, occurring in individuals with an abnormal vita sexualis. Thus there had arisen a general view of the nature of sexual anomalies, by which these anomalies were allotted almost entirely to the province of the physician, and were described as stigmata of degeneration. H. J. Löwenstein,[456] Häussler,[457] and Kaan,[458] in the third and fifth decades of the nineteenth century, were the first to adopt this medical point of view of sexual aberrations; and finally, in the last quarter of the same century, Richard von Krafft-Ebing[459] converted modern sexual pathology into a comprehensive scientific system,[460] which stands and falls with the idea of degeneration.
Von Krafft-Ebing is, and remains, the true founder of modern sexual pathology. Without wishing in the slightest degree to underestimate the value of the clinical researches he carried out in this province of research, characterized by precision and profound scientific zeal—without undervaluing for a moment these extraordinary services—I am compelled to point out that his purely medical view of sexual aberrations is one-sided, and to insist that it must be amplified and rectified by anthropological and ethnological researches.
Let us leave the hospital and the medical consulting-room; let us make a journey round the world; let us observe the sexual activity of the genus homo in its manifold phenomena, not as physicians, but as ordinary observers; let us compare the sexuality of the civilized human being with that of the savage: then we shall recognize the vast extension of our visual field for the comprehension of psychopathia sexualis; we shall see how the civilized and temporary phenomenon becomes absorbed into the general human phenomenon, presenting amid all local variations the same fundamental lineaments. Psychopathia sexualis exists everywhere and at all times. Culture, civilization, and diseases play only the parts of favouring, modifying, intensifying factors.
I do not go so far as Freud, who, on account of the now generally recognized wide diffusion of perverse sexual tendencies, is compelled to adopt the view “that the rudiments of perversions are the primeval general rudiments of the human sexual impulse, out of which the normal sexual mode of behaviour is developed in the course of evolution, in consequence of organic changes and psychical inhibitions”;[461] but I do maintain that sexual perversities and perversions appertain to the human race as such, and independently of civilization. I am convinced that they are supplementary to normal sexual manifestations, and that their diffusion among civilized and savage peoples extends far more widely than the circle of true degenerative phenomena.
The sexual impulse, as a purely physical function, is neither an object of comparison nor a distinctive characteristic between primitive and civilized humanity. The “elementary ideas” of humanity return everywhere again in the elementary manifestations of sexual aberrations.
From the investigations collected and published in the above-mentioned work I have been led to the firm conviction, which I must now put forward as a scientific truth based upon the teaching of anthropology, folk-lore, and the history of civilization, that at the present day, in our time so widely decried as “nervous,” “degenerate,” and “overcivilized,” not only are there no more sexually “perverse” persons than there were in former days—let us think only of the middle ages, with their frightful excesses, appearing in epidemic diffusion—but, further, that the greater part of the perversions of the present day are not to be regarded as “degenerations” at all; and, finally, that the factors which are to weaken and undermine the vital forces of a nation must be something other than purely sexual factors. For sexual aberrations alone have, taken as a whole, but a trifling influence in effecting the decadence of a nation. They first gain such an influence in combination with causes, which we cannot now discuss, of an economic and political nature.
As old as humanity is the fable of the good old times, of the golden youth of the human race, of the glorious past, to which an always corrupt, physically and morally rotten present is supposed to have succeeded.[462] The ancients held this view; it recurred at the time of the renascence; and since the time of Rousseau’s unfortunate condemnation of all civilization, it has been, in the hands of all zealots, moral fanatics, backsliders, and guardians of conventional morality, a greatly prized weapon, and one, also, of great power when used to influence the ignorant and easily misled. Anthropology, the history of primitive man, and the history of civilization in general, have utterly destroyed this beautiful dream of the good old times and of the better days of the past. Nothing has been left but the ever more beautiful present!