Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion

Westphal, an eminent professor of psychiatry at Berlin, may be said to have been the first to put the study of sexual inversion on an assured scientific basis.  In 1870 he published in the Archiv für Psychiatrie, of which he was for many years editor, the detailed history of a young woman who, from her earliest years, was sexually inverted.  She liked to dress as a boy, and only cared for boys' games, and, as she grew up, was alone sexually attracted to women, with whom she formed a series of tender relationships, in which the friends obtained gratification by mutual caresses, accompanied by the spontaneous or artificial production of the venereal orgasm; while she blushed as was shy in the presence of women, more especially the girl with whom she chanced to be in love.  She was always absolutely indifferent in the presence of men.  Westphal combined keen scientific insight with a rare degree of personal sympathy for those who came under his care, and it was this combination of qualities which enabled him to grasp the true nature of a case such as this, which by most medical men at that time would have been hastily dismissed as a vulgar instance of vice or insanity.  Westphal perceived that this abnormality was congenital, not acquired, so that it could not be termed vice; and, while he insisted on the presence of neurotic elements, his observations showed the absence of anything that could legitimately be termed insanity.