ABSTRACT
In the 1893 translation of the seventh edition of Psychopathia Sexualis-the first to include the terms “sadism” and “masochism”—Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing defines “sadism” as “an excessive and monstrous pathological intensification of phenomena . . . which accompany the psychical vita sexualis, particularly in males.” He continues: “What he feels is, as a rule only the impulse to cruel and violent treatment of the opposite sex, and the coloring of the idea of such acts with lustful feelings.”1 Over the course of 30 pages, drawing on copious case studies and the literature of the eighteenth-century French libertine Marquis de Sade, for whom sadism is named, Krafft-Ebing argues that sadism is a distinctly gendered sexual perversion, an extreme extension of normative masculinity. His catalog of male sadism includes some cases that one could categorize as evil. From Lustmord to corpse mutilation, the sexual sadist gains carnal pleasure through the pain of others. In the two pages he dedicates to female sadism, Krafft-Ebing offers two historical examples, two contemporary case studies, and four works of nineteenth-century literature as evidence for what he considers an extremely rare perversion.
