Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0965032418, Paperback)

This groundbreaking and unabridged classic from the founder of modern sexual pathology contains 238 case histories detailing every form of sexual perversion - with a new appendix of additional (previously excised) case histories, an essay by Krafft-Ebing on homicidal "menstrual psychosis," and an introduction by Brian King (author of "Lustmord: The Writings and Artificats of Murderers"). Translated from the twelfth and final German edition, Psychopathia Sexualis is essential reading for students of sexual perversity, criminal psychology, and European fin-de-siecle art and literature. First published in Germany in 1886, Krafft-Ebing's book was extremely successful as both a classic reference volume for psychiatrists and as a new form of pornographic literature for the sexually transgressive and perverse. Printed in seven languages and twelve editions during the author's lifetime, Psychopathia Sexualis was an influence on such notable figures as Sigmund Freud (a younger colleague of Krafft-Ebing's at the University of Vienna), painters Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, writers Marcel Proust and Frank Wedekind, and philosopher Georges Bataille and the surrealists. Psychopathia Sexualis is extraordinarily timeless in its factual depiction of the astonishing vagaries of sexual life. As a psychiatric text, it was one of the first books to extensively illuminate and define such subjects as sadism, masochism, fetishism and homosexuality; as a work of sexual literature, it has often been compared to the Marquis de Sade's classic, "120 Days of Sodom."