exual
Inversion as an inborn morbid phenomenon.

(A) "Sexual feeling and sexual instinct," he begins, "remain latent,
except in obscure foreshadowings and impulses, until the time when the
organs of procreation come to be developed. During the period of
latency, when sex has not arrived at consciousness, is only potentially
existent, and has no powerful organic bias, influences may operate,
injurious to its normal and natural evolution. In that case the
germinating sexual sensibility runs a risk of being both qualitatively
and quantitatively impaired, and under certain circumstances may even
be perverted into a false channel. Tarnowsky has already published this
experience. I can thoroughly confirm it, and am prepared to define the
conditions of this acquired, or, in other words, this cultivated
perversion of the sexual instinct in the following terms. The
fundamental or ground predisposition is a neuropathic hereditary bias.
The exciting or efficient cause is sexual abuse, and more particularly
onanism. The etiological centre of gravity has to be sought in
hereditary disease; _and I think it is questionable whether an untainted
individual is capable of homosexual feelings at all_."[22]

Krafft-Ebing's theory seems then to be that all cases of acquired sexual
inversion may be ascribed in the first place to morbid predispositions
inherited by the patient (_Belastung_), and in the second place to
onanism as the exciting cause of the latent neuropathic ailment.

He excludes the hypothesis of a physiological and healthy deflection
from the normal rule of sex. "I think it questionable," he says,
"whether the untainted individual (_das unbelastete Individuum_) is
capable of homosexual feelings at all." The importance of this sentence
will be apparent when we come to deal with Krafft-Ebing's account of
congenital sexual inversion, which he establishes upon a large induction
of cases observed in his own practice.

For the present we have the right to assume that Krafft-Ebing regards
sexual inversion, whether "acquired" or "congenital," as a form of
inherited neuropathy (_Belastung_). In cases where it seems to be
"acquired," he lays stress upon the habit of self-pollution.

This is how he states his theory of onanism as an exciting cause of
inherited neuropathy, resulting in sexual inversion. The habit of
self-abuse prepares the patient for abnormal appetites by weakening his
nervous force, degrading his sexual imagination