Magnus Hirschfeld and Erotic Age Preference (1896–1935): Per Scientiam ad Justitiam?

Abstract

The medicalization of outlying erotic age preferences has always been a controversial dimension of modern psychiatry. Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s forensic demarcation of pedophilia erotica in 1896 was a defining point; however, the problem of homosexuality long provided the premier occasion for its scientific elaboration. Magnus Hirschfeld’s oeuvre is illustrative, featuring (a) the first survey-based approach, (b) a novel theoretical approach, as well as (c) one of the first therapeutic approaches, to problematic erotic age preferences. It shows the variety of ways in which pre-WW-II sexologists dealt with unusual, apart from normal, age ranges as erotic foci: as mere outliers on an ordinal spectrum of preferences, as cardinal types of homosexuality, as belonging to a distinct order of sexual perversions (thus “complicating” homosexuality), as types of fetishism, and as key symptoms of what Hirschfeld named psychosexual infantilism. Even at present this divergence of qualifications (mental disorder, symptom, dimension of sexual orientation or more broadly of “sexual constitution”) remains denied the biomedical closure sought by Hirschfeld cum suis.