Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. The author gratefully acknowledges support by the Fund for Scientific Research on Sexuality, Amsterdam. A tropology of moral injury and corruption long framed the plight of the sex crime victim. This regard is generally recognised as having been poor. This emergent polarity flattered law more than it did medical deliberation.
Both victims and offenders posed perennial questions of the relative import of experiential contingency and innate susceptibility in the causation of mental disorder.
Elementary to modern constructions of sexuality and maturity, both became figurations variably of innocence and corruption. Inevitably, their respective extended moments of medical deciphering refer to similar, vital questions of biography, identity, memory and medical savoir. Precocity β in mental exertion, sexual excitement, puberty or marriage β was named a key factor in the development of hysteria throughout the nineteenth century, for instance.
Freud was hardly the first to connect troubled innocence with neurotic diathesis, then, nor was he alone, in the early s, in giving psychosexual untimeliness a primary traumatogenic significance. Freud and Breuer were by this time gravitating toward a more intricate etiological circumscription of sexual innocence. Consideration of this sort may make it possible to understand why the sexual experiences of childhood are bound to have a pathogenic effect.
In Krafft-Ebing highlighted. It thus easily comes to higher degrees of affect, to the confusion of meaning, to despair. This elaborate gendered regard for socio-sexual experience was ratified both by the mid-century affect-centred theory of hysteria by Robert Brudenell Carter, and the social epidemiological approach by, among others, Pierre Briquet.
