154: Let’s Talk About Sex(ology): Narcissism, Part 5

The Summer of Narcissism journey brings Abby, Patrick, and Dan to late nineteenth century Europe, and to the revolutionary and controversial new discourse of sexology. Emerging at the intersections of medicine, anthropology, public health, education, and the legal system, sexology took up human sexual behavior not as a question of sin or theological denunciation, but as an object of scientific study. Introducing the field, Abby, Patrick, and Dan survey how various sexologists understood sexuality, sample the rich behavioral taxonomies they produced by way of reading from classic works by Richard Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, and reflect on how sexologists’ work combined an emphasis on self-consciously secular scientific objectivity with explicit moral attitudes and implicit normative assumptions. The three also how explore how the sexological enterprise struggled with the implications of two core problems – the question of auto-eroticism (the ways people use their own bodies for sexual pleasure) and the question of orientation (the ways people’s sexual behavior does or doesn’t involve the bodies of others). And as Abby, Patrick, and Dan discover, it was precisely while trying to reconcile those problems that two sexologists summoned Narcissus into modernity, and named “narcissism” for the very first time.  

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Selected works cited:

Havelock Ellis, “Auto-Erotism: A Psychological Study” (1898)

Paul Näcke, “Die sexuellen Perversitäten in der Irrenanstalt” (1899)

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886)

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)

Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (1998)

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