1840-1902

German Neuropsychologist

Richard Krafft-Ebing was a pioneer in the field of sexual psychopathology. He wrote the first-ever series of case studies of deviant sexual behavior, Psychopathia Sexualis, and was also a well-respected forensic psychologist.

Krafft-Ebing was born in Mannheim and educated at the University of Heidleberg in Germany. He was appointed professor of psychiatry at the University of Strasbourg at the relatively young age of 32. A year later he was appointed the director of the Feldhof Asylum near Graz, Austria, and from 1892 until his death he was the head of the psychiatry department at the University of Vienna.

Early in his career, Krafft-Ebing focused his work on the study of sexual behavior, a new field at that time. In 1886 he published Psychopathia Sexualis, a collection of 238 case histories of what he called "sexually abnormal people." It was in this book that the terms "sadism" and...