The Problem of the Pathogenic Cause in Sexual Psychopathology: between Krafft-Ebing and Foucault

Abstract

The objective of this article is to critically review, from a historical point of view, the issue of the cause in sexual pathologies, as they were approached in the Krafft-Ebing conceptual model, one of the greatest exponents recognized in the study of perversions. This approach is made from the English translation of the twelfth edition of his treatise Psychopathia sexualis, published in 1906. From this, a study on the author's production context was conducted, to interrogate then the model from the first volume of History of Sexuality by Foucault, where the author links the subject of sexuality to the psychiatric device. Distanced from the idea of a founding father in the field of perversions, it is possible to support the developments given within the paradigm of mental illnesses as conditions of possibility for the constitution of Krafft-Ebing's work, where the hypotheses of the cause are found traversed by an anatomo-pathological clinic. Foucault's contributions, and the collection of extradisciplinary elements, encourage the conception of a cause that is no longer organic, but historical. This methodological proposal has relevance in a context of lack of studies of this type, from a critical historiographic point of view, in the contemporary approach to perversions.