Sex Between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-speaking World, 1890s–1930s by Katie Sutton (review)

In 2011, Lady Gaga released her global synth-pop hit “Born This Way,” which has become a contemporary anthem for the LGBTQ+ movement. In a January 2019 episode of NPR’s All Things Considered, Tim Cox expressed his sentiments about this tune. Like many queer teenagers, Cox had been bullied at school, but the song helped him cope. It sent an empowering message of self-acceptance and tolerance about being gay and about being different in general. “All of a sudden,” Cox declares, “the idea that you were born this way and can’t change who you are isn’t just something that you feel: it’s something the entire world is being forced to understand” (Lynn Neary, “How ‘Born this Way’ Was Born: An LGBT Anthem’s Pedigree,” January 19, 2019 on NPR, https://www.npr.org/2019/01/30/687683804/lady-gaga-born-this-way-lgbt-american-anthem). Lady Gaga’s song sent a clear message: if being gay is inborn, it cannot be wrong. Had Lady Gaga finally settled the nature vs. nurture debate? Hardly so. One only needs to consider how the search for a ‘gay gene’ is still ongoing, despite the gene’s elusiveness. Conversion therapy, an extremely harmful practice that aims to change people’s sexual orientation or gender expression, continues to be legal in many U.S. states. (It was banned in Germany in 2020.) The question whether the key to understanding human sexuality is to be found in the body or in the mind is as relevant as it was over a hundred years ago, when a pioneer sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, and the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, pondered it.

Although Sex Between Body and Mind does not address Lady Gaga’s impact, Sutton’s book sheds light on the history of the enduring debate of nature vs. nurture. Sexologists and psychoanalysts were not monolithic groups, yet the former generally looked for explanations for human sexual behavior in the body; the latter, in the mind. Nevertheless, practitioners of both disciplines were aware that no single approach sufficed to explain the complexity of human sexuality. Sutton invites us to consider how the study of human sexuality required interdisciplinary approaches during the “era of scientific and cultural modernity,” which the author locates between 1890 and 1930 (9). Sutton focuses on the “interpenetrations” between these two disciplines, that is, the dynamic dialogue and vibrant debate that existed between sexology and psychoanalysis (28). Hardcore sexologists, such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch, or Albert Moll could not let go of psychological explanations, just as Sigmund Freud and his followers never quite gave up on finding answers to neuroses in the body.

Sexology and psychoanalysis were still new disciplines with weak institutional support and public recognition at the turn of the twentieth century. To legitimize themselves, sexologists and psychoanalysts responded to issues that required immediate attention, such as the effects of World War I on male sexuality, and addressed questions that had concerned psychiatrists since the mid-nineteenth century: the etiology of homosexuality and the mystery of childhood sexuality. Groundbreaking hormone research in the 1920s appeared to shed light on the biochemical processes that shaped human sexuality and influenced both fields. Finally, women’s emancipation and the homosexual rights movement opened up these fields to the study of female sexuality and trans-identified people. Sutton writes about each of these issues extensively.

The book’s six chapters are well researched and, while the material that is covered in some of them may not all be new to specialists in the history of sexuality, the particular strength in the book is to be found in the author’s insightful analysis of seminal texts, such as Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) or Moll’s The Sexual Life of the Child (1908). Moreover, Sutton...