Nineteenth-century European psychiatry on same-sex desires: pathology, abnormality, normality and the blurring of boundaries

Beccalossi, Chiara (2010) Nineteenth-century European psychiatry on same-sex desires: pathology, abnormality, normality and the blurring of boundaries. Psychology and Sexuality, 1 (3). 226 -238. ISSN 1941-9899

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Abstract

By interrogating the intellectual foundations of the normal and pathological within nineteenth-century European psychiatry, this article illustrates the extent to which same-sex desires were located on the borderline between the normal and the pathologi- cal. First, this article analyses the early-nineteenth-century French and British medical concepts of folie raisonnante, monomania and moral insanity, and their relationship with medical ideas of same-sex desires. It then considers mid-nineteenth century degen eration theory and the introduction of the category of sexual inversion in German psychiatry in the late 1860s. Finally, it deals with the late-nineteenth-century medical discussion about the presence of a latent bisexuality in all human beings at both embrylological and psychological levels, and the impact that such debates had on psychiatric discourses about same-sex desires. It is argued that understanding same-sex desires in terms of mutually exclusive categories of the pathological and the normal fails to appreciate the unstable and fluid notions of sexual ‘abnormality’ and ‘pathology’ within the nineteenth-century European psychiatric debates.

Additional Information:The Natural and the Normal in the History of Sexuality
Keywords:nineteenth-century European psychiatry; same-sex desires; normal; abnormal; pathological
Subjects:V Historical and Philosophical studies > V380 History of Science
V Historical and Philosophical studies > V145 Modern History 1900-1919
V Historical and Philosophical studies > V144 Modern History 1800-1899
V Historical and Philosophical studies > V220 European History
V Historical and Philosophical studies > V340 Intellectual History
Divisions:College of Arts > School of History & Heritage > School of History & Heritage (History)
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ID Code:19042
Deposited On:16 Oct 2015 08:37

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