How Psychologists De-Sexualized Adolescence in the Weimar Republic

Abstract

This article examines the work of several pioneers in the field of youth psychology in Germany during the Weimar Republic. It interprets their developmental theories as a reaction against psychoanalysis’s emphasis on sexuality and the period’s changing gender norms and sexual freedom. Youth psychologists described adolescence as a transitory period between childhood and adulthood in which sexuality should be understood as indeterminate and as preparation for adult life. Their efforts to de-sexualize youth were part of a normative project that naturalized heterosexuality, marriage, and reproduction as the result of “normal” development. Their discussions of adolescent sexuality relied on racist assumptions about “primitive” people and naturalized bourgeois gender and sexual norms. Playing down the sexual ambiguity and fluidity of adolescent sexuality contributed to the pathologization of adult homosexuality.