[Projet] “Under the curious but genuine circumstance of the accused’s erection… ”: Tracing Back Preferential Sexual Arousal Assessment in 19th Century Psychiatry (1850-1900)

In the double context of the revision of the Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (forthcoming DSM-V) and the application of Sexual Violent Predator (SVP) civil commitment laws in several American states, the reliability of “paraphilia” diagnosis is particularly at stake. Among the most commonly discussed issues both in clinical and forensic contexts are the insights provided by the measurement of sexual interests and preferences, which originally emerged in the 60’s to explore homosexual vs. heterosexual interests.

They can be divided into physical and nonphysical techniques, from penile plethysmography (PPG), electroencephalogram (EEG) and pupillometry, to card sort questionnaires and standardized inventories of erotic interests. From 1960 on, and despite theoretical, methodological and ethical concerns, a growing number of qualitative and quantitative studies were carried out in the aim of identifying sexual preference, and therefore discriminating between non-offenders, offenders, and different types of sexual offenders. The target population is therefore child sex offenders and sex offenders in general, i.e. individual convicted of rape, sexual torture or brutal crimes with a sexual nature. Undoubtedly these studies are part of the general need for reliability as far as paraphilia diagnosis is concerned in the case of violent sex crime.

Back to the 19^th century, the measurement of sexual arousal was however simply out of question, due to the lack of appropriate techniques. There indeed existed only non-physiological methods for discriminating sexual interest, i.e. clinical insights of either a criminological or psychological nature, which were precisely at their early stage of development. The only reliable data for the “sexual perversion” diagnosis were therefore related to the embryonic analysis of crime scenes or to self report via written or direct confession.

This paper will examine the various discursive strategies deployed by 19^th century psychiatrists to diagnose “sexual perversion” in clinical and forensic contexts, focusing on how the key issue of sexual arousal was addressed. Using the method of historical epistemology, I will argue that despite the lack of reliable measurement techniques, 19^th century psychiatrists developed key concepts and rationale which are still used in nowadays evaluation of paraphilic interests and clinical research on sexual arousal measurement.

More broadly this paper intends to show that from 1850 on, the “sexual perversion” diagnosis has been lying at the intersection between two epistemic and political necessities of equal importance: first, the necessity to ensure a minimal distinction between non-normative sexualities and genuine psychosexual conditions, i.e. to interfere as little as possible with the capacity for sexual activity with consenting adult partners; second, the necessity to ensure a juridical existence for moral responsibility, avoiding an invasive intervention of psychiatry within sex crime inculpation. Starting with the famous case of François Bertrand, the so-called Vampire du Montparnasse, as an inaugural case study (1849), we’ll travel through fin de siècle French and German psychiatry to the case of Abel B., who was diagnosed as having a “bloodthirsty perversion of sexual instinct” on the basis of his alleged “curious but genuine” erection while stabbing a young female prostitute (1893).