Med. Hist. (2019), vol. 63(4), pp. 411–434. c The Author 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press 2019 doi:10.1017/mdh.2019.42 Krankung¨ and Erkrankung: Sexual Trauma before 1895 DIEDERIK F. JANSSEN* Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University (external PhD programme), The Netherlands Abstract: A tropology of moral injury and corruption long framed the plight of the sex crime victim. Nineteenth-century psychiatric acknowledgment of adverse sexual experience reflected general trends in etiological thought, especially on ‘epileptic’ and hysteric seizures, but on the whole remained descriptive, guarded and limited. Various experiential threats to the modern sexual self beyond assault and rape were granted etiological significance, however: illegitimate motherhood, masturbatory guilt, sexual enlightenment, ‘homosexual seduction’ and chance encounters leading to fetishistic fixation. These minor early appeals to medical psychology help us appreciate the multiple nuances of ‘sexual trauma’ advanced in Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (1895) and Freud’s subsequent work. Keywords: Sexual trauma, Nineteenth century, History of psychiatry, Rape, Sexual abuse, Victimology A psychiatric parlance of sexual trauma is first attested in Breuer and Freud’s Studien uber¨ Hysterie (1895). Here the reifying expression carried divergent theoretical ambitions: Freud’s sexuelle Traumen referred to childhood experiences attaining ‘traumatic power’ as later memories (causing hysterical anxiety), while Breuer’s sexuale Traumen referred to anxieties and negative experiences commonly associated with female puberty (requiring repression) and the ‘sexual noxae’ of the marriage bed (causing hysterical somatic phenomena).1 The initial reception of Freud’s intricate and increasingly specific sense of sexual harm (sexueller Schadlichkeit¨ ), developed in his later seduction papers, was famously icy but it gained epochal traction after the 1970s – meriting probes into its intellectual debts2, and more broadly into nineteenth-century regard for the psychological sequelae of adverse sexual experience. This regard is generally recognised as having * Email address for correspondence: [email protected] The author gratefully acknowledges support by the Fund for Scientific Research on Sexuality, Amsterdam. 1 Jos[ef] Breuer and Sigm[und] Freud, Studien uber¨ Hysterie (Leipzig/Vienna: F. Deuticke, 1895) 115–16, 216, 242. 2 For example, Carlo Bonomi, ‘Sexuality and Death in Freud’s Discovery of Sexual Aetiology’, International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 3, 2 (1994), 63–87; Philip Kuhn, ‘Sigmund Freud’s Discovery of the Etiological Significance of Childhood Sexual Traumas’, Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 6, 2 (1997), 107–22; K. Codell Carter, ‘Germ Theory, Hysteria, and Freud’s Early Work in Psychopathology’, Medical History, 24, 3 (1980), 259–74. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.76, on 02 Oct 2021 at 07:40:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2019.42 412 D.F. Janssen been poor.3 Indeed: even by the mid-1920s, empirical interest in the specific plight of the sexual victim (Sexualopfer) had barely emerged alongside the by now much more discriminating focus on the sex offender (Sexualverbrecher, Sittlichkeitsverbrecher). This emergent polarity flattered law more than it did medical deliberation. Many of nineteenth- century sexuality’s pre-eminent malefactors – the onanist, invert and pervert – were themselves casualties; if not of seduction, then of chance impressions, social neglect or indulgence, addiction or compulsion, degeneration, hereditary or congenital anomalies, or some infaust combination of these.4 Moreover, sexual victims and offenders historically converged on a similar historical turn inward of the medico-forensic gaze: from diagnostic probing of the affected body, to the soul-searching of the affected self. Both victims and offenders posed perennial questions of the relative import of experiential contingency and innate susceptibility in the causation of mental disorder. Elementary to modern constructions of sexuality and maturity, both became figurations variably of innocence and corruption. Inevitably, their respective extended moments of medical deciphering refer to similar, vital questions of biography, identity, memory and medical savoir. To better appreciate how sexual experience became traumatic, below I map nineteenth- century etiological concerns for adverse sexual experience apropos a brief appraisal of Freud’s and Charles Fer´ e’s´ mid-1890s accounts; identify various experiential stressors drawing psychiatric attention (illegitimate maternity, moral virginity, masturbation, sexual inversion/perversion); consider the becoming-psychiatric of the two main nineteenth- century sexual victims – minors and women; and close with a brief appraisal of criminal anthropologist Moriz Benedikt’s early victimology. Innocence and Injury: Féré and Freud The conceptual groundwork for Freud’s sexual trauma has been mapped in considerable detail. Accounts of traumatic neurasthenia (Beard), hysterie´ traumatique (Charcot) and traumatische Neurose (Oppenheim) offered in the 1880s, dividing Wilhelmine 3 ‘It was not until the twentieth century that [American] physicians directly engaged the issue of sexual traumata, and even then they were not the object of sustained inquiry’: Lisa Cardyn, ‘The construction of female sexual trauma in turn-of-the-century American mental medicine’, in Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (eds), Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 172–201, here 181; ‘The lack of connection between trauma and sexual crime was not limited to [Victorian and Edwardian] Britain, but reflected a general trend within European thought’: Victoria Bates, Sexual Forensics in Victorian and Edwardian England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 133–4; ‘At least into the Sattelzeit [1750–1850] the [continental European] court does not treat sexualized violence as the psychological trauma of a subject but – inter alia – as the moral jeopardy of a Christian and his or her society’: Francisca Loetz, Sexualisierte Gewalt 1500–1850. Pladoyer¨ fur¨ eine historische Gewaltforschung (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2012), 204; ‘In contrast to the legal sources [on rape, discussed by author] ::: a notion of trauma is absent from [Dutch nineteenth-century] scholarly discourse as presented by forensic scientists’: Willemijn Ruberg, ‘Trauma, Body, and Mind: Forensic Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Dutch Rape Cases’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 22, 1 (2013), 85–104, here 93. See also Georges Vigarello, Histoire du viol: XVIe-XXe siecle` (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 229–32; Louise A. Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 2000), 152–4. 4 Rare eighteenth-century case reports of homosexuality already negotiated these exculpatory etiological nuances. There were reasons to negotiate: well into the nineteenth century, the medico-legal scope of same-sex sexuality was still that of ‘corruption of boys’ (Knabenschandung¨ ). See [Anon.], ‘Nachricht von einer seltsamen Irrung eines menschlichen Triebes’, in Beitrage¨ zur Beruhigung und Aufklarung¨ uber¨ dieienigen Dinge, die dem Menschen unangenehm sind oder sein konnen,¨ und zur nahern¨ Kenntniß der leidenden Menschheit. Vol. 1, Pt. 2 (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1789), 327–49; [Anon.], ‘[Zur Seelenheilkunde:] 2. [“Auszug aus einem Briefe”]’, Gnothi¯ sauton: oder, Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde als ein Lesebuch fur¨ Gelehrte und Ungelehrte, 8, Pt. 2 (1791), 101–6. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.76, on 02 Oct 2021 at 07:40:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2019.42 Krankung¨ and Erkrankung: Sexual Trauma before 1895 413 stakeholders over the issue of social insurance and the wartime fate of the nation, foregrounded the question of the relation between physical trauma and its affective reverberation.5 To Freud and Breuer, Charcot’s specific allusions to autosuggestion and focus on male hysteria insinuated the possibility of a properly psychic trauma.6 Freud went on to suspend trauma between psychosexual immaturity and maturity, intuitive concepts burdened with a late eighteenth-century, but still largely implicit, scientific urgency. Sexual adversities had gained little etiological profile at the Hopitalˆ de la Salpetriˆ ere` (notoriously so7), and Freud’s earliest allusions to childhood ‘sexual noxae’ drew no clear support from any literature. These allusions were, in their essence, commonsensical, referencing an extended archive of Enlightenment investments in innocence (Unschuld), puberty (Mannbarkeit) and moral-psychological development (moralische Entwicklung)– notions that had been fracturing the emergent concept of ‘sexuality’ and that sponsored a general frame for conceptualising developmental ‘harm’ and precocity. Leading Enlightenment educator Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746–1818) illustratively identified many purported harms (Schadlichkeit¨ ) of ‘premature’ education of children, including sexual and psychosexual precocity.8 During the 1780s and 1790s, premature awakening of the sexual instinct presented a recurrent and urgent hygienic challenge to the figureheads of both the Philantropinists and the German public health (medicinische Polizey) movement.