and Kertbeny, Westphal’s influence should also be seen in the context of the developments in central European research. At the same time as Prussian military might became increasingly manifest and German cities both within and outside of Prussia became more and more prosperous, German universities began to reap the benefits of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s post-Napoleonic reforms of the educational system. German universities attained a preeminent status, especially in the sciences, that they would maintain until well into the twentieth century. The positive developments in the German university system affected Austria too, where the universities enjoyed enormous prestige in the second half of the nineteenth century. Within German psychiatry, the so-called Somatiker, who—as their name suggests—favored somatic interpretations of mental illness, had become dominant in the middle of the nineteenth century.69 The more philosophical legacy of Romantic psychiatry was set aside, at least until Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis could bring back a psychology less based on the body. In 1869, the world was prepared to listen to a leading German psychiatrist’s somatic interpretation of same-sex desire.
The full title of Westphal’s article makes clear its medicalizing and pathologizing agenda: “Sexual Inversion, Symptom of a neuropathic (psychopathic) Condition” (Die conträre Sexualempfindung, Symptom eines neuropathischen [psychopathischen] Zustandes). Unlike Ulrichs and Kertbeny, who allude to medical evidence while not completely accepting a pathological diagnosis, Westphal is convinced that certain forms of same-sex desire are a sickness. Admittedly, he denies that every single case of same-sex desire is pathological: “in order to prevent from the beginning all misunderstandings, I want to state expressly that it is not my idea to identify all individuals who commit unnatural sexual offences as pathological! I know very well that this is not the case.”70 He goes on to explain that, just as there are some pathological thieves and murderers among the many normal thieves and murderers, so there are some pathological sexual inverts among the many people who commit sexual crimes with members of their own sex. Clearly, he has no room for a nonpathological expression of same-sex desire that is also noncriminal.
As a somaticist, Westphal locates the roots of same-sex desire in the body. Sexual inversion is “an inborn reversal of sexual feelings.”71 His first patient, a woman identified as “N,” has known of her desires for other women since childhood. Westphal finds the epilepsy of his second patient, “Ha …,” significant, suggesting a link to neurological dysfunctions. He is certain the condition can be inherited: “We can certainly with some justification make heredity responsible for the origin of the pathological condition of the patient.”72 On a variety of fronts, Westphal promotes and underscores the physical origins of same-sex desire.
The physical and psychological symptoms of sexual inversion include feminine characteristics in his male patients and masculine characteristics in his female patients. Emphasizing the importance of gender inversion, Westphal cites Ulrichs frequently, repeatedly stressing that the male invert has female characteristics and vice versa. His first patient, the woman “N,” speaks the language of inversion precisely: “I feel completely like a man and would like to be a man.”73 His second patient, “Ha …,” adopts the clothes and indeed the entire habitus of a woman. Westphal claims to have noted “Ha …”’s feminine comportment as soon as he saw him knitting in the hospital waiting room.74
More so than Ulrichs and Kertbeny, Westphal is consistent in exploring the possibilities of gender symmetry inherent in the notion of inversion. Ulrichs and Kertbeny repeatedly neglect to include women in their examples, despite acknowledging the existence of women who are sexually attracted to women. Westphal however starts out with a woman and devotes a considerable amount of time to women’s sexual inversion.
Westphal’s essay is an assertion of power, part of a tradition of medical claims to expertise in sexual matters. Significantly, he denies the layperson the ability to determine gender in both cases. He cautions that “N” does not seem unfeminine; about “Ha …” he is only willing to concede that “one can perhaps find something feminine” in his facial features.75 Several decades later, Näcke continues in the tradition of insisting that certain types of expertise are required to determine who is truly gender transgressive: “this requires a specially schooled eye, such as the scholar of inversion, the homosexual himself, the artist, the tailor, and so forth have, but that others—for instance myself—do not.”76
Westphal’s claim to medical power makes counter-assertions of power by his patients all the more interesting, particularly in the case of the woman “N.” Middle-class, she assisted her sister who ran a girls’ boarding school in the country. Having been conscious of her desires for the female sex since her childhood, she regularly indulged in them when she was between eighteen and twenty-three. Since then she had only been able to masturbate. She declares that “female occupations were always distasteful to me; I would like to have a masculine occupation, and have therefore always been interested in mechanical engineering, for instance.”77 Besides the compelling tragedy that this woman’s desire to be a mechanical engineer is pathologized stands the noteworthy fact that her voice manages to cut through the medical language. Westphal has the honesty to report that she does not consider herself insane: “She declared that she herself wanted to go to a hospital, but was however surprised that she had been brought to an insane asylum, as she was not mentally ill.”78 “N” and Westphal are some of the first players in what Gayle Rubin calls the “intensely collaborative enterprise between the doctors and the perverts.”79
While “N” is a middle-class woman working in an educational establishment, Westphal’s second patient comes from a socially more disadvantaged background. Westphal calls him “Ha …,” although he himself claims to be “U.B.” An effeminate cross-dresser, he goes to jail multiple times, for stealing women’s underwear and garments and for “fraudulently” posing as a lady, receiving sentences ranging from two months to five years. “Ha…” claims to have resisted all sexual advances from men,80 confirming Foucault’s observation that Westphal’s invert is characterized “less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain manner of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself.”81
Many enigmas surround Westphal’s account of “Ha….” The exact details of the arrests and the prison record are confusing and contradictory. Why bother to distinguish between his assumed name “U.B.” and his “real” name of “Ha …,” if both names were changed in order to maintain confidentiality? How serious is the assertion that “Ha …” never had sex with his gentlemen admirers? When “Ha …” claims he would “earn money” at the train station, where he frequently found a “lover,” it sounds like he was in the practice of offering sex for money. Perhaps “Ha …” defined sex such that he could offer physical gratification to his lovers while believing he was resisting their sexual advances. When he boasts that he “earned a great deal of money” while making “demands on gentlemen,” it sounds like he might have been demanding payment after putting the men in a sexually compromising position.82 Blackmail was certainly frequently on the minds of the urnings, inverts, and homosexuals of nineteenth-century Europe. This is not to deny Foucault’s point that, even if sexual activities took place, they were apparently always done in order to support a kind of gender inversion, specifically what “Ha …” calls his passion “for those damnable women’s clothes, which have always been my undoing.”83
Westphal’s case is clearly different from that of Ulrichs and Kertbeny. While Ulrichs relies at times on medical evidence to make his points and Kertbeny claims medical expertise in order to legitimate his position, only Westphal consistently and thoroughly pathologizes same-sex desire. Working within a medical context, he makes no extensive demands on the political situation, although he was against the criminalization of those whose acts were the result of a medical condition like “sexual inversion.” Whereas Ulrichs and Kertbeny present a relatively positive picture of the urning and the homosexual, Westphal’s invert is quite clearly sick. Westphal believes the inversion is
