Already boasting an impressive number of scientific publications, von Krafft-Ebing was eager to pursue an academic career. After a trial lecture in Leipzig under the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Wunderlich, a decision on his habilitation was expected soon. However, on May 13, 1872, von Krafft-Ebing was able to inaugurate his psychiatric clinic in Strasbourg.

Masochism, which Krafft-Ebing focuses on at length, is for example defined as a particular erotic sensibility, in which the individual is, "in his sexual feelings and thoughts, dominated by the idea of being absolutely and unconditionally subjected to a person of the other sex". [1] Recovery from a bout of typhoid led him to spend a summer in Zurich, where he became acquainted with Wilhelm Griesinger's brain anatomical studies. He observed practices in Vienna, Prague, and Berlin. Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing was the first scientist who brought the terms sadism and masochism into psychiatry. The origin of the term sadism is associated with the name of Donatien Francois Marquis de Sade (1740-1815). Sadism takes its name from the writings and exploits of this French writer, found to have been one of the nine prisoners held in the Bastille, when it was stormed in 1789. The Marquis de Sade wrote novels in which he described scenes of torture and killing in a sexual context. whether she had a lover. B. Anæsthesia Sexualis (Absence of Sexual Feeling). 1. As a Congenital Anomaly. The psychiatric understanding of perversion signalled that in the modern experience, sexuality, as a distinct impulse with its particular internal physical and psychological mechanisms, dissociated itself from other social domains and began to generate its own meanings. As such, sexuality became associated with profound and complex human emotions and anxieties. Foucault rightly understood the continuity of nineteenth-century psychiatric interference with sexuality and the present-day craving for self-expression. Both are based on the confessional model that proclaims sexuality to be the key to individual authenticity and identity. However, I would argue that Foucault’s assessment of this model of sexuality as limiting possibilities is one-sided. It is more than an instrument of professional power and social control. The formation and articulation of sexual identities only became possible in a self-conscious, reflexive bourgeois society in which there was a dialectic between humanitarian reform and emancipation on the one hand, and efforts to enforce social adaptation and integration on the other. The elaboration of psychological explanations of various sexual tastes at the end of the nineteenth century was advanced by professional psychiatry, as well as by the historical development of individualisation and social democratisation.Richard Krafft-Ebing was born in Mannheim, Baden, Germany, on August 14, 1840. He received his education in Prague, Austria-Hungary (now in the Czech Republic), and studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg. Jörg Hutter. "Richard von Krafft-Ebing", in Homosexualität. Handbuch der Theorie- und Forschungsgeschichte, pp. 48–54. Ed. Rüdiger Lautmann. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1993. ISBN 3-593-34747-4 Volkmar Sigusch: Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902). In: Volkmar Sigusch, Günter Grau (Hrsg.): Personenlexikon der Sexualforschung. Campus, Frankfurt am Main u. a. 2009, ISBN 978-3-593-39049-9, S. 375–382. Krafft-Ebing saw and viewed women as basically sexually passive, and recorded no female sadists or fetishists in his case studies. Behavior that would be classified as masochism in men was categorized as "sexual bondage" in women, which was not a perversion, again because such behavior did not interfere with procreation.

Dr. Krafft-Ebing served as a medical superintendent at a German mental asylum from 1872-1880. The institution functioned more as a prison than a hospital. Krafft-Ebing’s tenure at the asylum afforded him access to patients with a cadre of mental ailments, including those who committed crimes with sexual overtures. He began collecting case studies of his patients, which he used as fodder for his medico-forensic analysis. The original version of the text featured 42 case studies but expanded to 238 case studies by its twelfth edition. The predominant emphasis on the purportedly first-hand patient accounts, which could be considered as confessional narratives, may be the key factor in both the book’s longstanding interest and its voyeuristic cultish appeal. The book had a considerable influence on continental European forensic psychiatry in the first part of the 20th century. It is regarded as an important text in the history of psychopathology. [2]Krafft-Ebing considered procreation the purpose of sexual desire and that any form of recreational sex was a perversion of the sex drive. "With opportunity for the natural satisfaction of the sexual instinct, every expression of it that does not correspond with the purpose of nature—i.e., propagation,—must be regarded as perverse." [16] Hence, he concluded that homosexuals suffered a degree of sexual perversion because homosexual practices could not result in procreation. In some cases, homosexual libido was classified as a moral vice induced by the early practice of masturbation. [17] Krafft-Ebing proposed a theory of homosexuality as biologically anomalous and originating in the embryonic and fetal stages of gestation, which evolved into a " sexual inversion" of the brain. In 1901, in an article in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types), he changed the biological term from anomaly to differentiation. The psychological dimension of sexuality first appeared as a typical constituent not of ‘normal’ heterosexuality but of perversion and masturbation. As Krafft-Ebing explained, certain mental stimuli, such as fantasies, prevented the spontaneous physiological process that supposedly characterised normal sexuality from taking its course. Later, however, he also drew attention to the decisive role of the mind in the development of sexuality in general. He considered normal sexual functioning as more than just the physical ability to have intercourse. Likewise, the satisfaction of the sexual urge was not only made up of physical release but also of emotional fulfilment. Moll’s discussion of the Contrectation drive implied a similar view. Both he and Krafft-Ebing postulated a complicated interaction between body and mind, including, as Krafft-Ebing phrased it, the ‘unconscious life of the soul’. 84 A bibliography of von Krafft-Ebing's writings can be found in A. Kreuter, Deutschsprachige Neurologen und Psychiater, München 1996, Band 2, pp. 767-774. Peter Weibel, ed. Phantom of Desire, Visions of Masochism. Essays and Texts, pp. 36–38. Graz: Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum. ISBN 3-936298-24-6 Sexualempfindung [ The Contrary Sexual Feeling], which carried a laudatory preface by Krafft-Ebing. 10 Moll, who regarded Krafft-Ebing as the founder of the science of sexology, corresponded with him and passed several case histories on to him. In 1924 he published the sixteenth and seventeenth editions of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia