ABSTRACT
The study of deviant sexuality began at the end of the nineteenth century with the publication of the first edition of Krafft-Ebing's voluminous treatise Psychopathia Sexualis, in which the sexual aberrations were for the first time deemed an object worthy of psychiatric study. For Krafft-Ebing, whose oeuvre resembles a huge fresco many times revised and extended, the fundamental form of all deviations was reflected in sadism and masochism, which represented the active and passive aspects respectively of the drive of subjugation. Long before Freud, Krafft-Ebing believed in the intimate connection between polarities such as sadism/masochism and male/female, as well as in the bisexual disposition of human beings. For all the keenness of some of his intuitions, Krafft-Ebing did not succeed in formulating an appropriate theory of perversion; unlike Freud, he lacked a conceptual apparatus that could draw a line of demarcation between mental health and illness and distinguish between constitutional factors and early environmental experiences.
