Figure · 1840 to 1902
Richard von Krafft-Ebing: The Psychiatrist Who Filed the Words
By Marguerite Osei, Biographies Published 16 August 2026
In brief
Richard von Krafft-Ebing was an Austro-German forensic psychiatrist who, in Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886, turned two novelists' surnames into the clinical terms sadism and masochism. He wrote for doctors and courts rather than for readers, put the most explicit passages in Latin to keep the book out of lay hands, and late in life argued that at least one of his own categories should not be counted a disease at all.
Two words in common use today were assigned by one man in one book. Richard von Krafft-Ebing did not discover the desires he named, and he was not the first physician to write about them. What he did was give them labels precise enough for a courtroom, and those labels stuck for more than a century.
The career before the book
He was born in Mannheim in August 1840 and grew up with the law close at hand; his maternal grandfather was a well-known jurist. He studied medicine at Heidelberg, graduating in 1863, with periods in Zurich and Vienna, and went into asylum work. Chairs of psychiatry followed at Strasbourg in 1872, at Graz in 1873, and at Vienna in 1889. He died near Graz in December 1902.
The part of the biography that explains the book is the forensic part. Krafft-Ebing spent his career being asked by courts whether a defendant was responsible for what they had done, and he published a textbook of forensic psychopathology in 1875, eleven years before Psychopathia Sexualis. He came to sexual behaviour as a man required to give evidence about it, not as a man curious about it. That is why the resulting categories read like charges.
What Psychopathia Sexualis actually was
The first edition, published in Stuttgart in 1886, was slim. Its subtitle announced a clinical and forensic study, and its structure was a numbered sequence of case histories, stripped of identifying detail, each attached to a category. The explicit passages were set in Latin, a deliberate barrier meant to keep the book among professionals.
The barrier failed, which turned out to matter more than the barrier. The book sold, and it kept growing: successive editions swelled with new material until the last ones he oversaw ran to hundreds of cases. A great deal of that new material was unsolicited. People wrote to him, at length, describing their own lives in their own words, and he printed them. A diagnostic manual partly composed by the people it diagnosed is a strange object, and historians of sexuality have spent decades arguing about what to make of it.
Why two authors’ names
Krafft-Ebing needed terms that did not read as moral verdicts. Cruelty, vice and perversion all carried a judgment he could not use in a report to a court. Taking a name from literature solved that: the label arrived with a description already attached, because anyone who had read the novels knew what the word pointed at.
The cost was that it pointed at the authors too. Sade had been dead for seventy-two years and had no reputation left to lose. Sacher-Masoch was alive, still publishing, and had a body of Galician fiction that the new word would eventually bury. The borrowing habit was not unique to him: Alfred Binet named fetishism in 1887, and Krafft-Ebing took that term into later editions in turn. Naming was how this field was being built, and nobody was consulting the people or the writers being named.
The late revision
The editions are a record of a man changing his mind in public. His account of homosexuality moved furthest, from a degenerative condition to something congenital and finally, in a paper published in 1901, to the position that it should not be classed as a disease at all. That is a striking reversal from a physician who had spent fifteen years supplying courts with the opposite view.
He did not revisit sadism and masochism in the same way. They stayed where he had filed them, and the filing outlived him by a very long time: both remained in psychiatric diagnostic manuals into the twenty-first century, and the separation of a paraphilia from a paraphilic disorder is a recent development, not an original one.
What the naming did
Two consequences ran in opposite directions. The first is the obvious one. A forensic category gave courts, clinicians and legislators a vocabulary for treating these desires as evidence of disorder, and that vocabulary was used against people for a hundred years and more.
The second is less comfortable to state. A word in a medical dictionary is a word that can be looked up. Krafft-Ebing’s correspondents wrote to him precisely because his book had given them a term for something they had not been able to name, and a term is the first thing a scattered population needs in order to find itself. The subculture that eventually formed did so partly through language it inherited from the man who pathologised it, a debt it has never been very comfortable acknowledging.
The century that produced him is covered in the 1800s era essay, the afterlife of his two coinages in how sadism and masochism got their names, and the sequence of everything that followed on the full timeline.
This page is assembled from published biographies and the notes at the back of them, period magazines and newspapers, the minutes, newsletters and membership records that organisations left behind, court reports and published judgments, and academic histories of sexuality. Dates and events are taken from that documentary record rather than from what the subculture repeats about itself, and the two often disagree. Where the record is thin, where it survives only through a single interested witness, or where historians still argue about what happened, the page says so in the text instead of smoothing it over.
Questions readers ask
Did Krafft-Ebing invent the word sadism?
Not quite. The French noun sadisme was already in circulation and in dictionaries decades before 1886, so he adopted an existing word and gave it a clinical definition. Masochism is his own coinage, built from the surname of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
Why is Psychopathia Sexualis partly written in Latin?
He put the passages he judged most explicit into Latin so that the book would be readable by physicians, lawyers and judges but not by a general audience. It did not work. The book sold widely, went through a dozen editions in under two decades, and reached exactly the readership he had tried to exclude.
Was Krafft-Ebing hostile to the people he described?
His framework treated their desires as pathology, and that framing had real consequences in courts and clinics for the next century. His own position moved across sixteen years of revisions, most visibly on homosexuality, which he argued in a paper published in 1901 should not be regarded as a disease. He did not extend that revision to sadism and masochism.
Every name here started by finding other people
Letters, small-circulation magazines, back rooms, mailing lists. The channel changes every generation and the reason for it never does.
See where it happens now