Sexual Modernity as Subject and Object

Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity.Harry Oosterhuis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. 321. $30.00.

Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna.Chandak Sengoopta. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. 239. $29.00.

Twenty years ago, Carl Schorske published his path-breaking book Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. The product of twenty years of research, it famously identified late imperial Vienna as the birthplace of a European modernity characterized by the demise of nineteenth-century "rational man" and the emergence of his twentieth-century counterpart, "psychological man." ¹ Schorske traced this development in a range of domains, from art and architecture to literature and politics, all of which were reinvented and radicalized in a collective oedipal revolt against the values of classic liberalism. Given Schorske's own psychoanalytic leanings, it was not surprising that Sigmund Freud's accomplishments occupied a central place in his analytic framework. More than any other figure, the resident of Berggasse 19 represented fin-de-siècle Vienna's cultural psychodynamics. Schorske's reading of Freud, however, was quite selective. He focused on The Interpretation of Dreams and examined how the concept of the modern psyche, understood as an entity driven by unconscious desires, emerged in relation to the political field of the Habsburg Monarchy. In doing so, he de-emphasized Freud's seminal thought on sexuality, itself the product of contemporary social constellations. The domains of gender and sexuality failed to make a sustained appearance in Schorske's masterpiece; and while the author should not be faulted for his analytic choices, his work's lacuna has delayed recognition of fin-de-siècle Vienna's centrality in the constitution of modern sexual identity.

Rather than following a Schorskean paradigm of cultural history, the development of modern sexuality has been theorized and researched in light of Michel Foucault's seminal contributions. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault identified modern sexuality as a historical invention of the nineteenth century. Sexuality, he argued, only emerged as an intelligible domain when such distinct entities as behavior, physical characteristics, and psychological conditions were coalesced into coherent subjectivities that could speak the truth about a person's inner being. Part and parcel of the bourgeois processes of surveillance and individualization, sexuality was the principle site of a "bio-power" that produced new knowledge of the self. Medical science was central to this process, particularly in the form of such disciplines as sexology and psychiatry. Practitioners in these fields created elaborate taxonomies of sexual pathology--inventories, Foucault argued, that reimagined sexual deviance as well as sexual health as permanent psychophysiological conditions. In his formulation the early modern sodomite had been a "temporary aberration"; according to bourgeois medical sciences, "the homosexual was now a species." ²

Research on the history of modern sexuality has followed the Foucauldian paradigm to a remarkable degree. Although some scholars have questioned his specific periodization, many have scrutinized the globally emerging medical regime of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the site of modern sexual identity formation. ³ In doing so, most scholars have also accepted his powerful critique of the medical sciences. While maintaining that disciplines like sexology and psychiatry shaped rather than repressed sexuality, Foucault argued that the exertion of "bio-power" was ultimately designed to curtail the pleasures of the body--a form of subordination that identified sexual pathologies only in order to contain them. Consequently, much of the available literature takes an extremely dim view of the late nineteenth century, regarding the moment of modern sexuality's medical codification as the onset of a perpetual surveillance through the exertion of bodily tyranny.

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Harry Oosterhuis's important book Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity, continues in the Foucauldian tradition while at the same time providing an important corrective to the recent literature. Like Foucault, Oosterhuis focuses on the fields of psychiatry...