ABSTRACT
The term derives from the Latin aberrare, "to go astray, wander off." It is significant that the first recorded English use of the verb "aberr" (now obsolete), by John Bellenden in 1536, refers to religious heresy. For nineteenth-century alienists and moralists, the word aberration took on strong connotations of mental instability or madness. Thus, in its application to sexual nonconformity, the concept linked up with the notion of "moral insanity," that is to say, the nonclinical manifesta tion of desire for variant experience. The notion of departure from a presumed sta tistical norm, and the prefix ab-, connect with the concept of abnormal. The prolif eration of such terms in the writings of psychiatrists, physicians, moralists, and journalists in the first half of the twentieth century reveals a profound ambivalence with regard to human variation, in which prescriptive condemnation struggles with, and often overcomes, descriptive neutrality.
