What the doctor saw: a brief history of sexology
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/consummation/what-the-doctor-saw-a-brief-history-of-sexology-931188.html (http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/consummation/what-the-doctor-saw-a-brief-history-of-sexology-931188.html)
Cathy Holding
9/15/2008
Over the past 150 years, it seems the study of sex has interacted with society at large to influence, and be influenced by, current morals, ideologies and social behaviours.
In 1896, Richard von Krafft-Ebing published his book Psychopathia Sexualis, a landmark text in the study of sexual mania and deviation comprising 238 case studies. Perversions of the sexual instinct were, he believed, caused by degeneracy, which was popularly defined as hereditary weakness or a taintedness in the family pedigree. Henry Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud were instrumental in bringing sexuality out of the Victorian cold, but both were sufficiently influenced by the views of the time to base their interpretations of sexuality in terms of control-repression and drives.