History,causality, and sexology

In 1896, Krafft‐Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis. Popularly defined as hereditary weakness or taintedness in the family pedigree, degeneracy was called upon as a causal explanation for perversions of the sexual instinct. Although Krajft‐Ebing accepted Karl Ulrichs’ proposal that homosexuality could be innate and probably located in the brain, he paid little attention to neuropathological sexology. Alfred Binet challenged Krafft‐Ebing's orthodoxy by explaining fetishism in terms of associative learning, to which Krafft‐Ebing's response was that only those with a hereditary taint would be vulnerable. Thus did the venerable nature‐nurture antithesis maintain its rhetoric, even to the present day. Krafft‐Ebing died too soon to meet the Freudian challenge of endopsychic determinism, and too soon also to encounter the idea of a developmental multivariate outcome of what I have termed the lovemap. Like other brain maps, for example the languagemap, the lovemap requires an intact human brain in which to develop. The personalized content of the lovemap has access to the brain by way of the special senses.