R. von Krafft-Ebing

Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) was a German-Austrian psychiatrist, born in Mannheim and educated at Heidelberg. He directed an asylum in Baden, taught at Strasbourg and Graz, and from 1889 was professor of psychiatry at Vienna. A pioneer of forensic psychiatry, he wrote a standard textbook of the subject and investigated hypnotism and the relation between syphilis and general paralysis of the insane. His Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886 and much enlarged in later editions, classified the varieties of sexual behavior through hundreds of case histories, introduced the terms sadism and masochism, and argued that homosexuality was congenital rather than criminal. Freud and his contemporaries built on it.