The Emergence of Sexology in Early Twentieth-Century Germany

Abstract

This chapter focuses on three specific factors pivotal to the emergence of sexology in Germany during this time: the vaunted status and increasingly important political role of science and medicine; the growth of a discourse on modernity and its effects, above all on health and morality; and the expansion of variegated reform movements and their increasing reliance on science to support their demands and visions for change. It then illuminates the integral role sex reform groups played in creating, collecting, curating, and circulating sexual scientific knowledge, and especially highlights the roles women played in building sexology as a field of knowledge—as well as the opposition their involvement increasingly provoked.

‘All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of sex’: Development and the social function of the sexual instinct in late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexology

“…This understanding of sexual science reveals, as much recent scholarship has established, the centrality of colonial frameworks and fantasies about geographically distanced and often racialized 'Others' within sexual scientific research frameworks (Chiang, 2009; see also Bleys, 1996;Hoad, 2000;Leck, 2018;Leng, 2016;Marhoefer, 2022;Schields and Herzog, 2021;Willey, 2018). 4 As many scholars have shown, the sexological interest in the case study sat alongside an engagement with other inter-and cross-disciplinary forms of knowledge, including comparative evidence of different sexual customs and behaviours from historical, anthropological, sociological, and zoological investigations (Bauer, 2009(Bauer, , 2015Chiang, 2009;Funke, 2015, 2018;Leck, 2016;Leng, 2016Leng, , 2018Moore, 2021). 5 Cross-cultural and cross-historical investigations of the sexual instinct shifted attention away from the individual case study, placing greater emphasis on human developmental trajectories over large timescales.…”

“…Sexual science also encompassed various (often intersecting) political and ideological commitments. In this article, we use the term sexologist or sexual scientist to refer to this capacious group of sex researchers; however, as part of acknowledging the flexibility of the contours of the field as it emerged, and to address the contestations that existed (and continue to exist) about what is and what is not legitimate scientific knowledge about sex, we simultaneously describe sexologists by their other professional and political positions (as, for instance, psychiatrists or feminists; Leng, 2018). Sexual science was also a global field of knowledge, fully embedded in the imperial structures of knowledge production that dominated patterns of global exchange and interaction in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Chiang, 2009;Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones, 2018).…”

“…Sexological organizations and networks, including the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, the World League for Sexual Reform, and the Institute of Sexology in Berlin, actively participated in conversations around birth rates, including discussions about whether and how the numbers of births might be managed to the advantage of both the individual couple and society as a whole (Matte, 2005). These debates about reproductive control drew directly and explicitly on sexological frames of reference and theorizations of the sexual instinct, and in turn linked the politics of reproduction, contraception, and population control to racialized assumptions about the evolutionary development of civilization (Carey, 2012; Dickinson, 2007; Garton, 2004: 161–7; Kline, 2005; Leng, 2018).…”

“…Considerations of the purpose of the sexual instinct played a central role in explaining the diversity of sexual desire. Recent research on the complexity of sexual scientific constructions of instinct has begun to examine the sexological interest in non-reproductive functions of the sexual impulse (Frederickson, 2014; Leng, 2018). The non-reproductive manifestations of the sexual instinct have received particular attention within scholarship on Freudian psychoanalysis.…”

“…Kirsten Leng has demonstrated that contestations around the ‘sex drive’ were central to debates around female sexuality in Germany. More specifically, Leng's work reveals how women sexologists challenged the ‘belief that the sex drive's primary function was reproductive’ and focused attention on the multifaceted elements of the female sex drive (Leng, 2018: 76).…”