Psychopathia Prostitualis

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I’ll discuss the book “Psychopathia Sexualis” in this article, including quotes, and will include page numbers for people who want to look at the context. Since it’s an old book, it’s in the public domain and you can follow along via a pdf. I highly recommend reading it in general for a foundation on the history of modern psychiatry and how the classification of disorders came to be!

People who engage in prostitution have long been pathologized and treated as deviant by a variety of institutions. As one of the first books on the topic of sexual pathology and homosexuality, it’s a text that gives a lot of insight into how our modern understanding of sexual disorders and paraphilias has developed.

When the idea of paraphilias was becoming more mainstream as a way to view certain sexual attractions and behaviours as a mental health issue, attractions and actions didn’t tend to have a clear distinction made between them. If you engaged in certain sex acts, you were assumed to have attraction to the people or thing you were engaging in sex acts with. A person who had sex with men was assumed to be attracted to them, regardless of their reasons for doing so, and a person who sold sex was assumed to be a person attracted to that line of work and manner of having sex. Now, we’d point out how material circumstances contribute, and certainly people at the time whose attractions and actions were not aligned often knew this was not a reasonable way of viewing them.

In Psychopathia Sexualis, which was originally written in German in the late 1800s, the topic of prostitution comes up constantly. It is generally used as evidence of some sort of malady or as the natural result of it. The book primarily concerns itself with the illnesses of men, who were considered to have more complex minds and had more of an ability to express their sexual desires. That means that sex workers aren’t often the ones being assessed, but association with them is viewed as evidence of some kind of sickness or immorality.