Word: psychopathia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...German psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing publishes Psychopathia Sexualis, which coins the terms “sadism” and “masochism” and describes sexual disorders in which acts of cruelty and bodily punishment become sexually pleasurable. At this time, the two “sexual anomalies” are understood as distinct: sadism involves finding sexual pleasure in inflicting pain on another person; masochism involves ceding control of a sexual situation to another person...
Once Wallace gets our gawking attention, his deviants become like the Krafft-Ebing case histories in Psychopathia Sexualis, grotesque illustrations of fundamental errors in personal relations. To what point? Wallace suggests coyly that Hideous Men is meant to interrogate the reader, to elicit fresh responses to horrors that have lost their edge in the age of information overload. Sometimes this works; when it doesn't, we get a facetious exercise like the "pop quizzes" in Octet that pose dire situations mimicking academic test questions...
...Psychopathia Sexualis, the latest off-Broadway effort from John Patrick Shanley (Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Four Dogs and a Bone), is, unfortunately, a model of what playwrights should avoid. It's a slim but labored farce about a young man (Andrew McCarthy) who can't make love without having his father's socks around and the psychiatrist (Edward Herrmann) who has taken them away. The stale shrink jokes wouldn't pass muster on an average episode of Seinfeld, not to mention Shanley's own better work, like his flavorful screenplay for Moonstruck. What Hollywood gave Shanley was discipline...
...twins, mutants, the monstrously fat, the grotesquely thin, dog-faced boys and zoophagous geeks. But the richly illustrated work is in fact a combination sideshow, meditation on human nature and medical textbook of the sort that librarians once kept locked away with scandalous volumes like Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis...
...facile analysis, the biographer suggests that Sacher-Masoch's depravity may have been caused by a dominant mother, a dominant nursemaid and a dominant aunt. This could explain why he was so upset when he heard that Dr. Krafft-Ebing had singled him out for inclusion in his Psychopathia Sexualis and coined the term masochism. After all, Masoch was his mother's family name, and he was concerned that her feelings would be hurt. He would have