Archive for Sexology
The
Early Years (1908-1933)
In his monumental study Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit (The Sexual Life of our Time, 1907), Iwan Bloch offered this programmatic statement:
| The author of the present work . . . is . . . convinced that the purely medical consideration of the sexual life, although it must always constitute the nucleus of sexual science, is yet incapable of doing full justice to the many- sided relationships between the sexual and all the other provinces of human life. To do justice to the whole importance of love in the life of the individual and in that of society, and in relation to the evolution of human civilization, this particular branch of inquiry must be treated in its proper subordination as a part of the general science of mankind, which is constituted by a union of all other sciences - of general biology, anthropology and ethnology, philosophy and psychology, the history of literature, and the entire history of civilization. |
Having thus mapped out the territory, Bloch proceeded to conquer it. His enormous erudition allowed him to continue:
| In so far as so comprehensive a mode of treatment is possible to one individual, the author has endeavored, in his investigation of the sexual life, to do justice to all these widely divergent points of view, in order to facilitate a comprehensive and objective consideration of all the relevant problems . . . Hitherto there has existed no single comprehensive treatise on the whole of the sexual life . . . The time is indeed fully ripe for an attempt to sift . . . the enormous mass of available material, and to present the result from a centralized standpoint. |
This new, centralized standpoint was that of the sexologist, and it soon came to be shared by others.
Bloch's new concept and his new term were eagerly embraced by admiring colleaques, and thus, only one year later in 1908, Magnus Hirschfeld was able to edit the first journal for sexology, the Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft. With this important publication, sexology was formally launched and quickly developed into a thriving academic endeavor.
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