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.