Overview

""With Heinrich Kaan's book we have then what could be called the date of birth, or in any case the date of the emergence, of sexuality and sexual aberrations in the psychiatric field."" Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974-1975 Heinrich Kaan's fascinating work-part medical treatise, part sexual taxonomy, part activist statement, and part anti-onanist tract-takes us back to the origins of sexology. He links the sexual instinct to the imagination for the first time, creating what Foucault called ""a unified field of sexual abnormality."" Kaan's taxonomy consists of six sexual aberrations: masturbation, pederasty, lesbian love, necrophilia, bestiality, and the violation of statues. Kaan not only inaugurated the field of sexology, but played a significant role in the regimes of knowledge production and discipline about psychiatric and sexual subjects. As Benjamin Kahan argues in his Introduction, Kaan's text crucially enables us to see how homosexuality replaced masturbation as the central concern of Euro-American sexual regulation. Kaan's work (translated into English for the first time here) opens a new window onto the history of sexuality and the history of sexology and reconfigures our understanding of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's book of the same name, published some forty years later.

Full Product Details

Author:   Heinrich Kaan ,  Benjamin Kahan ,  Melissa Haynes
Publisher:   Cornell University Press
Imprint:   Cornell University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 14.00cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 21.60cm
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9781501704604

ISBN 10:   1501704605
Pages:   208
Publication Date:   25 October 2016
Recommended Age:   From 18 years
Audience:   General/trade ,  College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Reviews

Anyone who has read Foucault's History of Sexuality will know that Heinrich Kaan's Psychopathia Sexualis is a crucial early work in the emergence of sexology, a work that was destined, as Benjamin Kahan makes clear in his sharp introduction, for a number of queer and vivid afterlives. What Kahan rightly calls the 'luminous strangeness' of Kaan's text will make it of vital interest to historians of psychology and of science, as well as to scholars working across many disciplines in the historiography of sexuality. -Peter Coviello, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America In their expertly rendered translation of Psychopathia Sexualis, Benjamin Kahan and Melissa Haynes have produced a milestone edition of a milestone work. Heinrich Kaan's treatise provides a critical bridge between Enlightenment philosophy and the science of mind; it is a landmark contribution to the histories of sexuality, psychiatry, and modernity. -Susan S. Lanser, Brandeis University, author of The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic 1565-1830 An important and revelatory addition to the historical literature of sexology, this translation of Heinrich Kaan's Psychopathia Sexualis takes us earlier in the nineteenth century than we are often accustomed to go in search of the origins of the strange fiction of a specific 'sexual instinct' and, perforce, of its lovely aberrations. Benjamin Kahan and Melissa Haynes have prepared a meticulous and elegant edition, for which we are in their debt. -Christopher Looby, University of California, Los Angeles, editor of The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman and Other Queer Nineteenth-Century Short Stories

The liminal status of the first Psychopathia Sexualis-its position near the end of a centuries-old mode of scholarly discourse and at the inauguration of a new disciplinary organization of knowledge-render Kaan's project interesting now in ways that it couldn't be for its contemporary audience. What's striking here-especially given the text is written in a language with liturgical and theological associations-is that Kaan begins and remains on a strictly naturalistic level of description and explanation. Kaan's work had some important implications. It treated human sexuality as entirely explicable within nature-with nonprocreative forms being, in effect, the accidental effect of a natural force being redirected via the brain. -Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed Anyone who has read Foucault's History of Sexuality will know that Heinrich Kaan's Psychopathia Sexualis is a crucial early work in the emergence of sexology, a work that was destined, as Benjamin Kahan makes clear in his sharp introduction, for a number of queer and vivid afterlives. What Kahan rightly calls the 'luminous strangeness' of Kaan's text will make it of vital interest to historians of psychology and of science, as well as to scholars working across many disciplines in the historiography of sexuality. -Peter Coviello, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America In their expertly rendered translation of Psychopathia Sexualis, Benjamin Kahan and Melissa Haynes have produced a milestone edition of a milestone work. Heinrich Kaan's treatise provides a critical bridge between Enlightenment philosophy and the science of mind; it is a landmark contribution to the histories of sexuality, psychiatry, and modernity. -Susan S. Lanser, Brandeis University, author of The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic 1565-1830 An important and revelatory addition to the historical literature of sexology, this translation of Heinrich Kaan's Psychopathia Sexualis takes us earlier in the nineteenth century than we are often accustomed to go in search of the origins of the strange fiction of a specific 'sexual instinct' and, perforce, of its lovely aberrations. Benjamin Kahan and Melissa Haynes have prepared a meticulous and elegant edition, for which we are in their debt. -Christopher Looby, University of California, Los Angeles, editor of The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman and Other Queer Nineteenth-Century Short Stories

"""The liminal status of the first Psychopathia Sexualis-its position near the end of a centuries-old mode of scholarly discourse and at the inauguration of a new disciplinary organization of knowledge-render Kaan's project interesting now in ways that it couldn't be for its contemporary audience. What's striking here-especially given the text is written in a language with liturgical and theological associations-is that Kaan begins and remains on a strictly naturalistic level of description and explanation. Kaan's work had some important implications. It treated human sexuality as entirely explicable within nature-with nonprocreative forms being, in effect, the accidental effect of a natural force being redirected via the brain.""-Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed ""Anyone who has read Foucault's History of Sexuality will know that Heinrich Kaan's Psychopathia Sexualis is a crucial early work in the emergence of sexology, a work that was destined, as Benjamin Kahan makes clear in his sharp introduction, for a number of queer and vivid afterlives. What Kahan rightly calls the 'luminous strangeness' of Kaan's text will make it of vital interest to historians of psychology and of science, as well as to scholars working across many disciplines in the historiography of sexuality.""-Peter Coviello, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America ""In their expertly rendered translation of Psychopathia Sexualis, Benjamin Kahan and Melissa Haynes have produced a milestone edition of a milestone work. Heinrich Kaan's treatise provides a critical bridge between Enlightenment philosophy and the science of mind; it is a landmark contribution to the histories of sexuality, psychiatry, and modernity.""-Susan S. Lanser, Brandeis University, author of The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic 1565-1830 ""An important and revelatory addition to the historical literature of sexology, this translation of Heinrich Kaan's Psychopathia Sexualis takes us earlier in the nineteenth century than we are often accustomed to go in search of the origins of the strange fiction of a specific 'sexual instinct' and, perforce, of its lovely aberrations. Benjamin Kahan and Melissa Haynes have prepared a meticulous and elegant edition, for which we are in their debt.""-Christopher Looby, University of California, Los Angeles, editor of ""The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman"" and Other Queer Nineteenth-Century Short Stories"

Author Information

Heinrich Kaan (1816-1893) was a physician in Vienna and a pioneering sexologist. Benjamin Kahan is Assistant Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life. Melissa Haynes is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Bucknell University.

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