Paraphilias Archives | National Humanities Center

Paraphilias

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Heinrich Kaan’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1844): A Classic Text in the History of Sexuality

Edited by Benjamin Kahan (NHC Fellow, 2016–17) Heinrich Kaan's fascinating work—part medical treatise, part sexual taxonomy, part activist statement, and part anti-onanist tract—takes us back to the origins of sexology. He links the sexual instinct to the imagination for the first time, creating what Foucault called "a unified field of sexual abnormality." Kaan's taxonomy consists … Continued

Minor Perverts

The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality

By Benjamin Kahan (NHC Fellow, 2016–17) Statue-fondlers, wanderlusters, sex magicians, and nymphomaniacs: the story of these forgotten sexualities—what Michel Foucault deemed “minor perverts”—has never before been told. In The Book of Minor Perverts, Benjamin Kahan sets out to chart the proliferation of sexual classification that arose with the advent of nineteenth-century sexology. The book narrates the … Continued