| Summary: | "Sex between Body and Mind is the first study of the disciplinary development of sexology and psychoanalysis and their inter-relationship across European knowledge cultures. It charts the ways in which knowledge about human sexuality was produced and negotiated by practitioners of these two fields as they grew into distinct professional disciplines, from the "talking cure" to the latest hormone research. Focusing on the German-speaking world, it shows how these encounters reached beyond the sterile walls of the clinic, asylum, or laboratory to shape, and also be shaped by, the needs of patients and emerging sexual minorities, including the world's first organized transgender rights movement. Sex between Body and Mind is focused on German-speaking central Europe, where scholars such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch, Albert Moll and Karen Horney in Berlin or Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Stekel and Helene Deutsch in Vienna were rapidly becoming world leaders in medical-scientific sex research. Examining often heated debates around the sexual life of the child, the nature of shellshock, the origins and treatment of homosexuality and transgender phenomena, female frigidity, and the sex hormones, this book intervenes in the current scholarship by offering a truly cross-disciplinary account of the making of sex as an object of "scientific" study in modernity. It tells an entirely new story of the gradual emergence of sexology and psychoanalysis as embodying separate approaches to the study of sex, a story which stresses their continued interrelationship, and the ways in which emerging distinctions between the two were always also part of a dialogic and competitive process. In doing so, it fundamentally revises our understanding of the production of modern sexual subjects"--
|
|---|
