ABSTRACT
In late nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, the possibility of separating sexual activity from reproduction combined with the relaxation of anti-sexual moral attitudes. Psychoanalytic theories of sexual development and its relationship to general psychological development grew ever more rich and complex. In the mid-nineteenth century, Krafft-Ebing conceptualized the variations that he found as forms of pathology, thereby moving discourse about sexuality away from morality and law and toward medicine. Harris has shown how the idea of gender can be conceptualized in terms of "attractors". When individuals live under an attractor that is associated with great pain or when a gender attractor is sufficiently unstable that an individual cannot feel secure that he or she is on a specific attractor, the resulting anxiety leads to defensive operations. Defenses designed to maintain the stability of the attractor.
