RT Book
T1 Reading, Writing, and the Whip
A1 Musser, Amber Jamilla
LA English
YR 2008
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/186661052X
AB Reading masochism as a literary phenomenon means exploring several layers of relationships—of literature and performance, of textuality and subjectivity—and the relationships among various practices of reading. I start with Krafft-Ebing and his practices of reading, examine the relationship between literature and practice, and end with an exploration of diagnosis and writing. Rousseau's Confessions exemplifies these rich layers, as a text with a life and readership of its own and as writing exercise, and exemplifies what Michel Foucault termed a technology of the self. The link I am forging between Krafft-Ebing and Foucault's technologies of the self offers a reevaluation of Krafft-Ebing and pre-psychoanalytic studies of sexuality. History has not been kind to Psychopathia Sexualis. Historians of psychiatry describe this compendium of sexual perversity as a footnote in Krafft-Ebing's otherwise illustrious career as a leading Austrian psychiatrist..