Abstract

Until recently, the history of sexology has been characterized by underdevelopment. Of course, there is a vast critical literature on Freud and his followers. But this literature excludes Freud's forgotten contemporaries. Who has ever heard of James Kiernan or Albert Moll? Until recently, by treating psychoanalysis discovered by Freud as the truth about sex, historians have stood in the way of a real history of sexology. Only since the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s has a critical historiography of sexology begun to emerge. Paul Robinson's Modernization of Sex and Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, both originally published in 1976, provide two radically different accounts.