Select Page

Freud reads Krafft-Ebing: A short Genealogy of Sadism

by | Vol 33 (1) 2015

This contribution presents a reconstruction of the way the concept of sadism was introduced and anchored in psychoanalytic metapsychology. It focusses on the first two editions (1905 and 1910) of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud’s singular indebtedness to Krafft-Ebing is emphasized. Subsequently, it is argued that Freud’s selective reading of Krafft-Ebing is determined by his model of hysteria. Freud seems unable to give an adequate account of sadism in his Three Essays and in his later work, sadism remains a conceptual “problem child” becoming an oversimplified passe-partout concept used to discuss the theme of human aggressiveness.

Related articles

  • Freud contra Laplanche: On Sadism and Masochism in "Instincts and their Viscissitudes"

    This contribution focuses on Freud's elaboration of the genesis of sadism and masochism in "Instincts and their Vicissitudes" (1915c). We first briefly recap the standard reading of this text by Jean Laplanche which relies on Freud's concept of "anaclisis". In our opinion, Laplanche's reading implicitly presupposes that Freud's discussion of sadism and masochism questions the sexualisation of an originally non-sexual aggressivity. In contrast, we argue that Freud's argumentation starts from the question how the aggressivity that is inherent in sexuality…

  • The Scandalous Fact of Fetishism: Charcot and Magnan, Binet and von Krafft-Ebing

    In this article, I discuss Freud's theory of fetishism and the most important resources he draws on to elaborate his theory, namely, three texts from the end of the 19th century, Charcot and Magnan's "Genital Inversions, and Other Sexual Perversions" (1882), Alfred Binet's "Fetishism in Love" (1887) and von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). I trace their respective theorizing on fetishism, where the attempt to categorize the perversions, a fascination with raw case-material and a focus on degeneracy and heredity as…

  • Freud en de archeologie

    Download full Text