ABSTRACT
Kurt Freund, MD, DSc (1914-1996), was one of the most influential researchers in the areas of sexual orientation, gender identity, and paraphilias in the latter half of the 20th century. Freund was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Czechoslovakia, and he conducted his pioneering research on penile plethysmography (phallometry) while living and working in Prague. He fled from Czechoslovakia to Canada in 1968, in the wake of the “Prague Spring,” and accepted a position at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry (now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health; CAMH) in Toronto. Shortly after arriving at the Clarke Institute, he began developing the first English-language version of his self-report questionnaire for erotic preferences and gender identity in men.
