The Saint of Sex

Was it Freud who first accepted homosexuality as not an illness? Perhaps not! Right now, I can remember only two of these people, who had done pioneering studies in this field.

The first of them is Havelock Ellis. I remember his name maybe because I read his book, "The Psychology of Sex".

His book, "Sexual Inversion", co-written with John Addington Symonds, described the sexual relations of homosexual men. Ellis also developed the concepts of auto-erotism and narcissism, both of which were later taken on by Sigmund Freud.

(I once read somewhere that unlike Freud, who was guilt-ridden for his relationship with his sister-in-law, Ellis led a very idealistic life. *However, I now can not find documents in support of this statement.*)

Ironically, Ellis sufferd from impotence. "Ellis suffered from impotence until he was about 60. With the help of a devoted lover, he finally cured the problem, and remained sexually active until he was 72. "I am regarded as an authority on sex, a fact which sometimes amused one or two (though not all) of my intimate women friends," Ellis wrote in his autobiography."

But that was not all. He was the guy who paved the way to the surveys of people such as Alfred Kinsey. "He objected to Freud's application of adult sexual terms to infants, and tried to demystify human sexuality - most of his English readers were raised in the asexual, ignorant, and prejudiced Victorian climate."

The other guy, a German named Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, preceded Ellis by about two decades. To show what this guy was, I quote below from Wikipedia.

"Krafft-Ebing elaborated an evolutionist theory considering homosexuality as an anomalous process developed during the gestation of the embryo and fetus, evolving into a sexual inversion of the brain. Some years later, in 1901, he corrected himself in an article published in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, changing the term anomaly to differentiation. He thus revealed himself as, if not as the first, at least one of the first professionals seeing homosexuals as normal people with a different sexuality.

But his final conclusions remained forgotten for years, partly because Sigmund Freud's theories captivated the attention of those that considered homosexuality a psychological problem (the majority at the time), and partly because Krafft-Ebing had incurred some enmity from the Austrian Catholic church by associating the desire for sanctity and martyrdom with hysteria and masochism (besides denying the perversity of homosexuals)."

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havelock_Ellis
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/havelock.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Freiherr_von_Krafft-Ebing