The modern notion of sexuality took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll. This modernisation of sexuality was closely linked to the recognition of sexual diversity, as it was articulated in the medical–psychiatric understanding of what, at that time, was labelled as perversion. From around 1870, psychiatrists shifted the focus from immoral acts, a temporary deviation of the norm, to an innate morbid condition. In the late nineteenth century, several psychiatrists, collecting and publishing more and more case histories, classified and explained the wide range of deviant sexual behaviours they traced. The emergence of medical sexology meant that perversions could be diagnosed and discussed. Against this background both Krafft-Ebing and Moll articulated a new perspective, not only on perversion, but also on sexuality in general. Krafft-Ebing initiated and Moll elaborated a shift from a psychiatric perspective in which deviant sexuality was explained as a derived, episodic and more or less singular symptom of a more fundamental mental disorder, to a consideration of perversion as an integral part of a more general, autonomous and continuous sexual instinct. Before Sigmund Freud and others had expressed similar views, it was primarily through the writings of Krafft-Ebing and Moll that a new understanding of human sexuality emerged.

This paper analyses how, prior to the work of Sigmund Freud, an understanding of infant and childhood sexuality emerged during the nineteenth century. Key contributors to the debate were Albert Moll, Max Dessoir and others, as fin-de-siècle artists and writers celebrated a sexualised image of the child. By the beginning of the twentieth century, most paediatricians, sexologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and pedagogues agreed that sexuality formed part of a child’s ‘normal’ development. This paper argues that the main disagreements in discourses about childhood sexuality related to different interpretations of children’s sexual experiences. On the one hand stood an explanation that argued for a homology between children’s and adults’ sexual experiences, on the other hand was an understanding that suggested that adults and children had distinct and different experiences. Whereas the homological interpretation was favoured by the majority of commentators, including Moll, Freud, and to some extent also by C.G. Jung, the heterological interpretation was supported by a minority, including childhood psychologist Charlotte Bühler.

Albert Moll was one of the most influential sexologists during the first three decades of the twentieth century. In contrast to his rivals Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld, his achievements have not yet been recognised adequately. The author gives a comparative account of the work of these three protagonists. This shows that Moll formed some ideas which are regarded as psychoanalytical today before Freud, and that he, in contrast to Hirschfeld, was able to reflect critically on contemporary discourses, such as the debates on racial improvement through eugenics. As scientific theories, Freud’s psychoanalysis represented the unconscious, fantasy, experience and latency, while Moll’s sexology represented consciousness, ontological reality, behaviour and manifestation. Moll’s major disagreement with Hirschfeld’s sexology was his advocacy of apolitical and impartial science, whereas Hirschfeld’s aim was to achieve sexual reforms politically. Added to these differences were strong personal animosities. Freud called Moll a ‘beast’ and ‘pettifogger’; and Moll complained about Hirschfeld’s ‘problematic’ character. When Hirschfeld escaped the Nazi terror and went to Paris, Moll denounced him in order to prevent him rebuilding a new existence in exile.

Using court records involving the expert testimony of the Berlin sexologist Albert Moll, my article demonstrates that during the early 1920s a shift in the ‘epistemologies of justice’ concerning the adjudication of sex crimes took place within German courtrooms. Namely, presiding judges considered a greater number of sexual acts as punishable, despite no change in the laws themselves. Central to my argument is the role of expert testimony in practice and its critical reception. By focusing upon the rhetorical strategies presented by attorneys, judges and expert witnesses (as well as defendants themselves and their relatives), it illustrates the functions of expert and tacit knowledge in court, which were often not mutually exclusive. Moll’s stature also enabled him to translate his scientific–medical expertise into state support for his testimonies, as well as the rebuilding of an international community of sexological authorities. It was only under Moll’s leadership that the First International Sexology Congress could take place in 1926, an event that marked the apex of his prestige.

In 1902, Albert Moll, who at that time ran a private practice for nervous diseases in Berlin, published his comprehensive book on medical ethics, Ärztliche Ethik. Based on the concept of a contractual relationship between doctor and client, it gave more room to the self-determination of patients than the contemporary, usually rather paternalistic, works of this genre. In the first part of the present paper this is illustrated by examining Moll’s views and advice on matters such as truthfulness towards patients, euthanasia, and abortion. The second part of this article discusses how Moll engaged with the then publicly debated issues of experimentation on hospital patients and the ‘trade’ of foreign private patients between agents and medical consultants. In both matters Moll collected evidence of unethical practices and tried to use it to bring about change without damaging his or the profession’s reputation. However, with his tactical manoeuvres, Moll made no friends for himself among his colleagues or the authorities; his book on ethics also met with a generally cool response from the medical profession and seems to have been more appreciated by lawyers than by other doctors.

The physician and sexologist Albert Moll, from Berlin, was one of the main protagonists within the German discourse on the opportunities and dangers of social engineering, by eugenic interventions into human life in general, as well as into reproductive hygiene and healthcare policy in particular. One of the main sexological topics that were discussed intensively during the late-Wilhelminian German Reich and the Weimar Republic was the question of the legalisation of voluntary and compulsory sterilisations on the basis of medical, social, eugenic, economic or criminological indications. As is clear from Moll’s conservative principles of medical ethics, and his conviction that the genetic knowledge required for eugenically indicated sterilisations was not yet sufficiently elaborated, he had doubts and worries about colleagues who were exceedingly zealous about these surgical sterilisations – especially Gustav Boeters from Saxony.

Shortly after the death of Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862–1929), the doyen of early twentieth century German para psychology, his former colleague in hypnotism and sexology Albert Moll (1862–1939) published a treatise on the psychology and pathology of parapsychologists, with Schrenck-Notzing serving as a prototype of a scientist suffering from an ‘occult complex’. Moll’s analysis concluded that parapsychologists vouching for the reality of supernormal phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis and materialisations, suffered from a morbid will to believe, which paralysed their critical faculties and made them cover obvious mediumistic fraud. Using Moll’s treatment of Schrenck-Notzing as an historical case study of boundary disputes in science and medicine, this essay traces the career of Schrenck-Notzing as a researcher in hypnotism, sexology and parapsychology; discusses the relationship between Moll and Schrenck-Notzing; and problematises the pathologisation and defamation strategies of deviant epistemologies by authors such as Moll.

In July 1925, the psychiatrist Albert Moll appeared before the district court in Berlin-Schöneberg charged with having defamed the medium Maria Vollhardt (alias Rudloff) in his 1924 book Der Spiritismus [Spiritism]. Supported by some of Berlin’s most prominent occultists, the plaintiff – the medium’s husband – argued that Moll’s use of terms such as ‘trick’, ‘manipulation’ and ‘farce’ in reference to Vollhardt’s phenomena had been libellous. In the three-part trial that followed, however, Moll’s putative affront to the medium – of which he was eventually acquitted – was overshadowed, on the one hand, by a debate over the scientific status of parapsychology, and on the other, by the question of who – parapsychologists, occultists, psychiatrists or jurists – was entitled to claim epistemic authority over the occult. This paper will use the Rudloff–Moll trial as a means of examining Moll’s critique of occultism, not only as it stood in the mid-1920s, but also as it had developed since the 1880s. It will also provide insight into the views of Germany’s occultists and parapsychologists, who argued that their legitimate bid for scientific credibility was hindered by Dunkelmänner [obscurantists] such as Albert Moll.