Freud and Albert Moll: how kindred spirits became bitter foes

Abstract

This article explores the antagonism between Sigmund Freud and the German neurologist and sexologist Albert Moll. When Moll, in 1908, published a book about the sexuality of children, Freud, without any grounds, accused him of plagiarism. In fact, Moll had reason to suspect Freud of plagiarism since there are many parallels between Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie and Moll’s Untersuchungen über die Libido sexualis. Freud had read this book carefully, but hardly paid tribute to Moll’s innovative thinking about sexuality. A comparison between the two works casts doubt on Freud’s claim that his work was a revolutionary breakthrough. Freud’s course of action raises questions about his integrity. The article also critically addresses earlier evaluations of the clash.

An ill-fated meeting

On the morning of 25 April 1909, Sigmund Freud wrote to Sándor Ferenczi that he was awaiting ‘two very interesting guests’: the German neurologist Albert Moll and Oskar Pfister, a Protestant pastor from Zurich. He added that ‘Moll will be very badly received; Pfister, to the contrary’. The next day Freud sent another letter to Ferenczi reporting that he had scolded Moll and almost thrown him out: ‘He is a disgusting, vicious, maliciously pettifogging individual’ (Brabant, Falzeder and Giampieri-Deutsch, 1993: 55). A few weeks later, Freud explained in a letter to Carl Gustav Jung – who had asked Freud ‘what was that black spirit doing in your house?’ (McGuire, 1974: 220, original italics) – what had happened during Moll’s visit:

I was amazed to discover that he regards himself as a kind of patron of our movement. I let him have it; I attacked the passage in his notorious book where he says that we compose our case histories to support our theories rather than the other way round, and had the pleasure of listening to his oily excuses: his statement was not meant as an insult, every observer is influenced by his preconceived ideas, etc. Then he complained that I was too sensitive, that I must learn to accept justified criticism; when I asked him if he had read ‘Little Hans’, he wound himself up into several spirals, became more and more venomous, and finally, to my great joy, jumped up and prepared to take flight. At the door he grinned and made an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve himself by asking me when I was coming to Berlin. I could imagine how eager he must be to return my hospitality, but all the same I wasn’t fully satisfied as I saw him go. He had stunk up the room like the devil himself, and partly for lack of practice and partly because he was my guest I hadn’t lambasted him enough. Now of course we can expect all sorts of dirty tricks from him.

Moll, who was further characterized by Freud as ‘a brute’ (McGuire, 1974: 223), briefly referred to his ‘courtesy call’ on Freud in his memoirs. Freud had received him with the words:

‘Nobody has attacked me like you have done. You accuse us of forging case-histories.’ In order to prove this, he took out my book about the ‘sexual life of the child’ and agitatedly pointed at the passage. (Moll, 1936: 55) ¹

For Moll it was clear that Freud was quick to take offence and could not deal with criticism. Although his name is often mentioned in historical works about sexuality, Albert Moll (1862–1939), and even more the contents of his works, are largely forgotten today. In the decades around 1900, however, he was one of the most prominent experts in sexual science in Central Europe. Three monographs established his authority in this new field. Die Conträre Sexualempfindung (Moll, 1891a) was one of the first medical works exclusively devoted to homosexuality. ² His Untersuchungen über die Libido sexualis (Moll, 1897–98), which built on his earlier book, provided an explanatory framework of sexuality in general. ³ In Das Sexualleben des Kindes (Moll, 1908), he elaborated his views on infantile sexuality. Later, Moll edited the Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaften (1912), ⁴ and an updated and expanded version of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s seminal Psychopathia sexualis (1886; Moll, 1924a), adding many of his own case studies and insights.

Das Sexualleben des Kindes was ‘the notorious book’ that enraged Freud, in particular because Moll criticized psychoanalysis (Moll, 1908: iv, 13, 82, 84, 154–5, 171–2, 205, 253–4). In Moll’s view, Freud’s very broad definition of infantile sexuality – including oral and anal tactile pleasures – as elaborated in his Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Freud, 1905) – lacked precision and empirical underpinning. Freud’s published case histories had not convinced Moll at all. He thought that the arbitrary ‘symbolic’ interpretations of these cases appeared to be guided by theoretical assumptions rather than empirical evidence. Psychoanalytic case descriptions seemed to be composed in such a way that they always confirmed the theory rather than test its validity. In Moll’s opinion, Freud ignored the likely distortions in the childhood memories of his neurotic patients, in particular as far as these were triggered by what the therapist suggested to them. He also overstated the role of sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses; according to Moll, this was only one possible causal factor among others, a view close to that of Freud’s earlier collaborator Joseph Breuer. Moll added that he tried the therapeutic method of Freud and Breuer in treating neurotic patients, but had not found that sexuality played such a prominent role as Freud claimed. As far as this method produced any result, for which the evidence was scarce, Moll believed that it was induced by the direct suggestive influence of the doctor’s intensive attention to the patient, rather than by the cathartic effect of bringing back repressed memories from childhood. Moll admitted that Freud deserved credit for drawing attention to unconscious mental processes ⁵ and throwing light on infantile sexuality, but in the introduction of his book he emphasized that a comprehensive treatment of the subject was, so far, not available. His own study, solidly based on the information of his patients as well as of ‘healthy people’, actually filled this lacuna in his view, thereby implying that Freud’s work lacked the same empirical rigour (Moll, 1908: iv, 15; see also 8–9, 111, 132). Moll’s book was widely reviewed in German and international medical and pedagogical journals and praised as the first comprehensive and empirical study of sexuality among children (Sauerteig, 2012: 175–6).

Character assassination

Moll’s criticisms, which were not entirely unreasonable or unusual (Jung, the psychologist William Stern and the journalist Karl Kraus, for example, expressed similar objections), struck at the heart of psychoanalysis. ⁶ Freud and his associates had mistrusted and demeaned Moll before his book appeared. Their misgivings were probably fuelled by their perception of the widespread hostility towards psychoanalysis among prominent medical authorities in Berlin (Abraham and Freud, 1965: 50, 55–6; Gay, 1988: 180, 193–5). Early in 1908, Moll invited Freud and also Karl Abraham to contribute to a new journal about psychotherapy and medical psychology (Zeitschrift für Psychotherapie und medizinische Psychologie, 1909–24), which he would be editing. Jung warned Freud that Moll – a shameless and ‘spineless’ man according to Jung – was not willing to accept the importance of psychoanalysis (McGuire, 1974: 151–2, 154–5, 163, 220–1; see also Abraham and Freud, 1965: 41, 67). Freud wrote to Abraham that he suspected that their relations with Moll would not develop ‘very amicably’ because, ‘in accordance with his rather underhand character’, he put up ‘a show of impartiality’ in order to oppose psychoanalysis (Abraham and Freud, 1965: 73).

What seems to have bothered Freud most about Moll was that Das sexualleben des Kindes questioned his authority on infantile sexuality. Following the strategy that attack is the best form of defence, Freud and some of his followers trashed Moll’s work at a meeting of the Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung on 11 November 1908, six months before Moll’s visit to Freud. ⁷ From the minutes of the meeting, it appears that the participants had made up their minds in advance about Moll’s book: it was unscientific and not original, merely an inaccessible and confusing compilation of facts and unfounded ethical judgements. In Paul Federn’s view the study was ‘worthless’, and, according to Freud, ‘inferior’ and ‘unreasonable’ (Nunberg and Federn, 1977: 43). Freud, who added that Moll’s style of reasoning was vacillating and indecisive, also argued that resolution, rather than prudence and precision, was the essence of science – a peculiar view of doing science, but perhaps a fitting characterization of his own approach. ⁸

Not only were Moll’s book and his scientific credentials disparaged, but also his motives and personality. It was clear that he had written the book in response to Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen without paying tribute to it, and therefore it showed, as Freud wrote to Abraham and also to Jung, Moll’s dishonesty and incompetence (Abraham and Freud, 1965: 58; McGuire, 1974: 175, 179). This ‘petty, malicious, narrow-minded character’ and ‘ignorant man’, according to Freud (Nunberg and Federn, 1977: 44–5), perceived any serious contribution by others to sexology as an attack on his territory, whereas he did not understand the ins and outs of psychoanalysis. The worst thing was that Moll did not acknowledge that he, Freud, discovered infantile sexuality (pp. 42, 44). Freud claimed that, in the scientific literature preceding his Drei Abhandlungen, ‘no trace’ of it could be found, an assertion that was very misleading, because sexual impulses among children had been discussed by, among others, Max Dessoir (1894), Wilhelm Stekel (1895), Wilhelm Fliess (1897), Havelock Ellis (1898a) and Moll (1891a and 1898) – authors with whom Freud was familiar. ⁹ Until late 1897, Freud tended to believe that children were without innate sexual feelings; if they experienced sexuality, this was caused by seduction or abuse by older persons, which might lead to neurosis in later life. According to Frank Sulloway (1992: 313), Moll was one of the authors who triggered Freud to abandon his seduction theory and to reconsider his views on infantile sexuality.

Even more curious was that, during the discussion at the Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung meeting, Freud referred to Moll’s book Untersuchungen über die Libido sexualis as proof for his priority claim, suggesting that infantile sexuality was not discussed in this book (even though it was), but incorrectly mentioning Iwan Bloch, another prominent German sexologist, as the author instead of Moll. The minutes secretary, Otto Rank, noted Freud’s error and added: ‘(Moll?)’ (Nunberg and Federn, 1977: 44). ¹⁰ As demonstrated by Sulloway (1992: 254, 266, 301–5, 516–18), Freud owned a copy of the first (1897–98) edition of Moll’s Untersuchungen, which he had read carefully soon after its publication, as can be deduced from a letter to Wilhelm Fliess in late 1897 (Bonaparte, Freud and Kris, 1954: 231) and the 36 markings by Freud (thin pencil lines in the margins and underscoring) of passages in his copy, which is now housed at the Freud Museum in London. ¹¹ In this book Moll, referring to Max Dessoir’s (1894) postulation of a phase of undifferentiated sexuality before adolescence, explained that sexual impulses were prevalent among children before puberty and that this was not abnormal (Moll, 1898: 43–52, 55–7, 83, 325–6, 351, 420–9, 433–9, 469–70, 581). In his copy of Moll’s work, Freud marked several sections about sexual feelings among children (Moll, 1897–98: 18, 44, 83, 351, 421, 425, 477).

All this did not prevent Freud from accusing Moll of plagiarism: ‘Moll has become aware of the importance of childhood sexuality through reading Drei Abhandlungen whereupon he has written his book’, he claimed, while at the same time ‘denying Freud’s influence’ (Nunberg and Federn, 1977: 44). In a letter to Abraham, Freud wrote that the work of this ‘dark character’ contained several passages that would justify libel action, but that it was better to respond to it with ‘prudence and silence’ (Abraham and Freud, 1965: 74). This suggests that Freud may have been aware of the shakiness of such action. Anyway, he chose another way to attack Moll. In the second edition of Drei Abhandlungen (Freud, 1910: 35, 41), which appeared a year after their hostile meeting, he added two footnotes stating that Moll denied the existence of infantile sexuality – a clear distortion which has been reproduced repeatedly by other psychoanalysts and biographers. Isidor Sadger (1915: 16), for example, attacked Moll for his ‘stupefying resistance’ against acknowledging the prevalence of sexuality among children (see also Sauerteig, 2012: 181).

Ernest Jones’ account of Freud’s reaction to Moll’s work does not make sense. According to Jones (1955: 114), Freud considered libel action because the book ‘was so vehement in its denial of infantile sexuality’. This was obviously not the case, but even if it was – implying that Moll claimed the very opposite of what Freud argued in Drei Abhandlungen – what would have been the logic of accusing him of plagiarism? Peter Gay (1988: 195) also incorrectly claims that Moll’s book contradicted all that Freud had been saying about the topic for a long time and further ignored the probability that Freud had been influenced by Moll’s work. More generally, in the historiography of psychoanalysis and sexuality, Moll’s achievements have been largely underrated and depicted in a one-sided way. By highlighting Moll’s supposedly conservative hostility toward putative more progressive figures, such as Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld, his sophisticated and innovative thinking about sexuality has faded into the background (see Oosterhuis, 2018; 2019: 1–2).

The discussion about Moll’s book at the meeting of the Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung, conducted in aggressive and hostile tones that were not unusual in Freud’s circle, was beyond any standard of fair criticism; this was character assassination, and the allegation of plagiarism was preposterous. As I will demonstrate, Moll could, in fact, have made a case accusing Freud of plagiarism – or at least of not paying due tribute to Moll’s earlier views on infantile sexuality, as well as on several other issues that Freud himself presented as groundbreaking in Drei Abhandlungen. Sulloway’s assessment (1992: 313) that ‘Freud’s published citations of Moll’s writings are not a reliable guide to the latter’s influence upon Freud’ is an understatement. The essence of many of Freud’s presumed novelties can be found in Moll’s Untersuchungen and partly also in his book about homosexuality (Moll, 1891a). This is not reflected in Freud’s few passing references to Moll’s work (Freud, 1905: 27, 36, 80), including the first footnote, which also briefly mentioned Krafft-Ebing, Moebius, Havelock Ellis, Näcke, v. Schrenck-Notzing, Löwenfeld, Eulenburg, Bloch and Hirschfeld. Sulloway (1992: 212) and Gay (1988: 144) nonetheless assert that Freud frankly acknowledged his indebtedness to these sexologists. According to Volkmar Sigusch (2008: 263), however, the footnote was typical of how Freud downplayed works on sexuality preceding his Drei Abhandlungen. He ignored not only previous discussions of infantile sexuality, but also the fact that Moll and some others had put the pathological and degenerative nature of sexual perversion into perspective and had shifted their approach to a comparison with sexuality in general. I think Sigusch’s judgement is more pertinent here.

Myths about Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen

I am not the first to draw attention to the conflict between Moll and Freud and the questionable role of the latter. Apart from Sigusch (2008: 261–84) and Sauerteig (2012), Sulloway (1992) ¹² above all has uncovered how the clash was related to the intellectual and social strategies used by Freud and his followers to promote psychoanalysis and claim novelty. The research of the authors cited above is helpful, but their demystification of Freud and rehabilitation of Moll does not, in my view, go far enough. Whereas Sauerteig’s excellent contribution focuses on infantile sexuality and does not cover Moll’s broader views, Sigusch (2008: 264) lists all the essential elements of Freud’s sexual theory that could already be found in Moll’s work, but he does not go into detail. The contents of Moll’s sexological writings published in the 1890s, which were more cautious and nuanced than those of most other sexual scientists, remain underexposed and warrant more attention than they have received so far.

Despite his meticulous analysis of how sexologists, in particular Moll and Ellis, foreshadowed many of Freud’s ideas, Sulloway (1992: 212) argues that Drei Abhandlungen surpassed their work in originality. His evaluation of Moll and Ellis is rather ambivalent. He emphasizes that their insights, being more advanced and better empirically founded than those of others, introduced ‘a new perspective on human sexual development’. Yet he also claims that they were not ‘particularly revolutionary’ and that they ‘gave similar expression at about the same time to clinical findings and ideas that were emerging . . . almost inevitably from within the whole sexology movement’ (p. 310). What made Freud’s theory superior and enduring, according to Sulloway, was his ‘flexible’ synthesis of explanations of sexuality in terms of inheritance versus acquirement. Freud’s extraordinary achievement was therefore that he made a breakthrough ‘in an old and tired debate’ (p. 319), whereas Moll and Ellis lacked the psychological insight to do so. ¹³ I think that this assessment is questionable and also contradictory in the light of Sulloway’s own overall argument that psychoanalysis was not the unique creation of the lonely hero Freud, but has to be understood in the context of late nineteenth-century medical science and biology. Why then should Freud’s sexual theory be seen as extraordinary, whereas that of Moll and Ellis, although innovative, was thought to reflect more widespread trends?

A similar ambivalence can be found in Sulloway’s discussion of Freud’s accusation of plagiarism vis-à-vis Moll. While he first demonstrates at length and convincingly that it was part of Freud’s strategy to stress the originality of psychoanalysis and to disregard criticism, Sulloway subsequently withdraws from the – in my view logical – conclusion that Freud’s attack on Moll was unsavoury. Sulloway suggests that Freud’s priority claim was not undeserved, since his wide definition of infantile sexuality was innovative: it differed from the narrower meaning of sexuality – more exclusively related to genital activity – supposedly sustained by Moll and others. Sulloway writes: ‘Thus what Moll, and later Ellis, appraised as “an undue extension” of childhood sexual theory by Freud, Freud deemed as the essential justification of his scientific priority over them’ (p. 475). Because he creatively elaborated existing ideas, Freud was supposedly groundbreaking after all.

Although Sigusch (2005: 28–32) is very critical about Freud, he tends to make a similar interpretation. In my view, neither Sulloway nor Sigusch are entirely correct with regard to Moll’s sexual theory. Although Moll rejected Freud’s sexual interpretation of various self-centred (oral, anal and genital) pleasures of the infant and their overlap with basic physical needs and functions, such as eating, drinking and defaecation, he was far from defining infantile as well as adult sexuality exclusively in genital terms. He referred, for example, to non-genital ‘erogenous zones’ of the body – using the term ‘zones érogènes’ in 1897, of which Freud must have been aware (Moll, 1897–98: 93) – and various shades of erotic affection and admiration, as well as sexual jealousy and feelings of shame among children (Moll, 1898: 821; 1908: 66–83).

Even if the argument of Sulloway and Sigusch made sense, it still would not be an excuse for accusing Moll of plagiarism. Moreover, Moll may have had a point in criticizing Freud for his vagueness when it came to defining sexuality. Freud responded to this criticism by arguing that an explanation of his broad meaning of sexuality was superfluous, because it was the logical consequence of his overall argument in Drei Abhandlungen (Nunberg and Federn, 1977: 45). Such reasoning – what is to be considered as sexual depends on the theory about sexuality – is clearly circular.

Also, Sulloway’s overall conclusion is, in my view, questionable. His book provides a thorough deconstruction of Freud’s manipulative strategies and his professed originality, but in the last chapter he claims that Freud was nevertheless a great thinker because of his formidable ability to take up ideas of others and then go creatively beyond them. Even the myth-making about the development of psychoanalysis – Sulloway (1992: 475, 489–503) identifies as many as 26 fabrications – is all of a sudden seen in a different light: all great scientific discoveries are inevitably surrounded by myths, and there is truth in them since such stories have a powerful impact on the collective imagination. In this way, Sulloway undermines his analysis in the preceding 500 pages.

The image of Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen as a revolutionary advance in thinking about sexuality has been reiterated time and again. His suggestion that he broke with ‘popular opinion’ and ‘poetic fables’, and with ‘errors, inaccuracies and hasty judgements’ (Freud, 1905: 1), has been taken at face value until the present day. There is a general belief among historians and other commentators that Freud, although drawing on other thinkers, fully eclipsed established views; that he inflicted, in Arnold Davidson’s (1987: 264–5) words, ‘a conceptually devastating blow to the entire structure of nineteenth-century theories of sexual psychopathology’. ¹⁴ This interpretation is connected to the story about the hostile reception of Drei Abhandlungen among a shocked and indignant public who could not swallow Freud’s radical and disturbing ideas (Jones, 1955: 12). Although Sulloway shatters this picture, at the same time he upholds one aspect: that Freud’s ‘boldness’ and ‘frank language’ in describing sexuality was ‘revolutionary’ (Sulloway, 1992: 451–2, 454, 456–7). He thus contrasts Freud with other authors, who supposedly did not use straightforward language and were not so progressive in their approach to sexuality.

Apart from the fact that psychiatrists such as Krafft-Ebing occasionally employed Latin in their description of sexual acts in order to prevent being censored, I see little difference between Freud’s rhetoric and that of Krafft-Ebing or Moll. In fact, the works of the last two were rather more explicit: they contained numerous case histories, autobiographical accounts and letters, in which articulate ‘perverts’ freely voiced their sexual experiences and fantasies. Krafft-Ebing and Moll considered such self-reporting as valuable for understanding perversion, and this opened up space for explicit and personalized talk about a wide variety of sexual feelings, which so far had been largely silenced in public (see Oosterhuis, 2000, 2012). Moreover, their studies included descriptions of erotic temptations in cities, the underworld of prostitution and homosexual subcultures, as well as examples from historical, ethnographical, literary and semi-pornographic writings. Freud’s publications about sexuality (1898, 1905, 1908a, 1908b), on the other hand, are more theoretical, largely without case histories and explicit descriptions of concrete behaviour.

In the light of the prevailing standards and prejudices of his time, Moll’s approach to sexuality was at least as liberal and pragmatic as that of Freud, while also tending towards historical and cultural relativism with regard to sexual morality. As a believer in scientific rationality, Moll denounced prudishness, secretiveness, moral crusades and double standards, and pointed out that excessive repression of sexual desire could be detrimental to health and well-being. In 1891 Moll (1891a: 223–46) criticized the moral denunciation and criminalization of homosexuality and, a few years later, he was among the first to support Hirschfeld’s petition (Petition, 1899: 257) against the penalization of ‘unnatural vice’ among men, which Freud signed more than 10 years later. Moll also questioned prevailing medical explanations of ‘perversion’ in terms of psychopathology and degeneration. ¹⁵ He was in favour of more equal relations between man and woman, companionate marriage, women’s right to sexual satisfaction, social support for unmarried mothers, and a rational sexual education of children.

Similarities and contrasts

Before elaborating on the parallels between Moll’s Untersuchungen and Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen, I will briefly compare their personal backgrounds, careers and attitudes. ¹⁶ Their relationship was clearly affected by what Freud himself indicated as ‘the narcissism of minor differences’ (Freud, 1930: 33). Both were of the same generation (Freud six years older than Moll), born in Jewish merchant families – Moll converted to Protestantism in 1895 – and social climbers. As agnostic intellectuals and neurologists with thriving private practices for patients of means, Freud in Vienna since 1886 and Moll in Berlin since 1887, they belonged to the educated and liberal bourgeoisie. Freud’s private situation as paterfamilias contrasted with Moll’s as a lifelong bachelor. Whereas Freud focused on neurosis and hysteria, Moll was consulted for a wider variety of psychosomatic ailments and also marriage, family and sexual problems. Both learned about hypnosis as a diagnostic and therapeutic method in the mid- and late 1880s during their stays in Paris and Nancy. They were at the forefront of applying this method and, later, other forms of psychotherapy, Freud moving to Breuer’s cathartic therapy and finally his own psychoanalytic method, whereas Moll eclectically used several techniques, in particular suggestion and behavioural conditioning.

Both were disciplined scholars and prolific writers, but did not succeed at university: Freud’s affiliation at the University of Vienna was that of part-time lecturer and extraordinary professor, and Moll never held any academic post, although his numerous publications qualified him for it. Moll displayed a wider variety of activities alongside his medical practice and writing: he regularly served as a forensic expert in courts; advised government and police officials about public health issues; promoted medical psychology and psychotherapy, in particular by editing journals in this field; and was involved in professional politics, negotiating with medical insurance organizations and articulating his outspoken opinions about medical ethics in terms of patients’ rights. Although he was part of the local medical establishment, Moll antagonized colleagues by voicing relentless criticism of his own profession on a series of issues, such as the involvement of patients in experimental research without their consent, the commercial interests of specialized clinics and private mental institutions, and proposals for laws and measures in the field of eugenics. He also ceaselessly denounced parapsychological and occult experiments and demonstrations as charlatanism and fraud, while striving for the recognition of hypnosis as a bona fide treatment in the hands of doctors. As a consequence of his attacks, Moll got involved in disputes and libel trials, in which he was relentless and sharp and, like Freud, did not shy away from ruthless ad hominem attacks on opponents.

Both Freud and Moll cultivated their independence and ‘outsider’ position, and were very confident of themselves and far from easy-going. Whereas Moll’s arrogance and rancour alienated him from others, Freud, although sharing such character traits, was more sociable and strategic. A crucial difference between the two, which explains Freud’s lasting fame and Moll’s eventual oblivion, was that Moll remained an Einzelgänger whereas Freud attracted followers and organized a movement in order to disseminate his theory and therapy. Moreover, although Moll’s studies were more thorough and sophisticated than those of most other sexual scientists, his thinking was not organized in a coherent system. He was a widely read, cautious and nuanced thinker, who developed his ideas in piecemeal fashion and acknowledged that his knowledge was far from definite. His style of writing was searching, going back and forth in his arguments, and it included some doubt and ambivalence. Freud’s claim that Moll’s indecisive style showed his intellectual weakness is unsound, but it is evident that Freud was the better writer and that Moll’s style of reasoning, as well as the length of his works, reduced their accessibility; for example, there were 872 pages in Moll’s Untersuchungen, but only 83 in the first edition of Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen. ¹⁷

Similarities in the sexual theories of Moll and Freud

The main points in Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen, foreshadowed by Moll in his Untersuchungen and partly also in his earlier book about homosexuality, were (1) the conceptualization of the sexual drive or ‘libido’ and its separation from reproduction, (2) the understanding of perversions, homosexuality in particular, in the light of normal sexuality, (3) the nature of infantile sexuality and the developmental perspective on sexuality, (4) the non-reductionist explanation of it in terms of interaction between the body and the mind, and between heredity and acquirement, and (5) the inconsistency with respect to whether sexuality has a (natural) aim or not. In his copy of Moll’s Untersuchungen (1897–98), Freud marked several passages about these issues. ¹⁸

Already, before Freud defined the libido likewise, Moll had articulated that the sexual ‘drive’ (Trieb) is a psychosomatic force and should be distinguished from the biological procreative ‘instinct’ that humans share with animals (Moll, 1897–98: 386, 399, 444; see also 1898: 8–25, 52–5). According to Moll, the sexual drive consists of two components, which often operate – in particular before adulthood – separately: lustful discharge of excitatory tension (Detumeszenz), with or without another person, and arousal through attraction to another being (Contrectation) (Moll, 1897–98: 23, 29, 41, 44, 53, 83). Freud’s criticism (1905: 36) that Moll’s discharge drive ignored objectless ‘auto-erotic’ lust is incorrect, because Moll included masturbation and other forms of solitary sexual excitation. Like Freud, he pictured the discharge drive as a compulsive, pushing energetic force that aims at nothing but physical gratification through very diverse ways (Moll, 1897–98: 546). A complete catalogue of all these ways, he noticed, was basically unfeasible, thus putting into perspective the current classificatory zeal in psychiatry (Moll, 1898: 581).

For Moll, it was evident that human evolution together with the interplay of nature and culture have made the human sexual drive much more precarious and complicated – transgressive and dangerous as well as potentially beneficial for society – than the instinctual sexuality of animals. The historical and geographical diversity of sexual expressions, including a wide variety of perversions, show that culture inevitably modifies the sexual drive. The artificiality of civilization has advanced the continuing refashioning and amplifying of sensual pleasure and enlarged its psychological and symbolic dimension. Man, Moll (1898: 406–7) wrote, ‘seizes the most ingenious methods to heighten voluptuousness, which one rarely finds among animals . . . All of this shows most clearly how far man has drifted away from nature’.

In the preface of his Untersuchungen, Moll asserted that the many misunderstandings about perversion in sexology, which was dominated by psychiatrists and neurologists and regrettably neglected by psychologists, were due to the lack of attention for normal sexuality and its connection to the abnormal (Moll, 1898: v; see also 1905: 273; 1908: 8–9, 111, 132). The sexual drive is no different from other physiological and psychological functions in showing a wide spectrum of variations and gradations. In different degrees, and either periodically or more enduring, perversion – ‘merely a modification of the normal drive’, according to Moll (1898: 689) – occurs among many individuals. His consideration of perversion as part of a more general, multidimensional sexual drive was different from the usual medical understanding of it as a symptom of underlying psycho- and neuropathy, as Freud clearly noticed (Moll, 1897–98: 557, 683; see also Freud, 1905: 11–12, 16–21, 24, 46–7). Any boundary between health and pathology should be put into perspective: instead of being absolute and qualitative, such a differentiation was rather gradual and quantitative (1898: 100, 318–20, 505, 553–6, 581–4, 590–3, 605, 618, 625, 685, 689–9). Moll questioned explanations of perversion in terms of psychopathology and hereditary degeneration. Using terms such as ‘morbid-like’ (‘krankhaft’) and ‘variation’, which Freud also employed, he viewed perversion as a more or less disordered phenomenon in itself, either with or without other pathological symptoms (Moll, 1891a: 131, 189–90, 204; 1898: 491, 510–11, 545, 638–41, 670–3, 675, 682–3; Moll and Ellis, 1912: 652).

Moll indicated that perversions throw light on fundamental aspects of normal sexuality. To a certain extent fetishism is an intrinsic feature of normal sexual attraction and lasting relationships, which are grounded in a distinct predilection for particular physical features of one’s partner. Its perversity depends on the degree in which the predilection for a specific feature or object has dissociated itself from a loved person, and has become the exclusive and obsessive target of sexual gratification without aiming for coitus. Sustaining conventional views of the natural differences between the sexes, Moll explained sadomasochism as an extreme form of normal heterosexuality depending on the polar attraction of active and aggressive masculinity and passive and submissive femininity. Voyeurism and exhibitionism show the prominent role of seeing and being seen in human sexuality in contrast to that of ‘lower’ animals, which have not gone through the evolutionary phase of adopting an upright position and rely on smell in their mating behaviour (Moll, 1897–98: 135, 318, 320, 325; see also Moll, 1898: 377–81).

Moll’s analysis of infantile sexuality further put into perspective the boundaries between normal and abnormal. In his case histories, he found that healthy and ‘perverted’ individuals differed little in their reports of precocious sexual experiences. Various impulses and activities – masturbation, affection for individuals of the other or the same sex and of different ages, attraction to animals, as well as fetishist, sadistic and masochistic penchants – are not uncommon in childhood, nor are they necessarily a foreboding of a lasting perversion in adulthood. Such leanings are usually part of the sexually undifferentiated developmental stage between the ages of 8–10 and the end of adolescence at around 20. At this age a distinct and continuous sexual drive has usually crystallized through the maturation of the sex organs, sensorial stimuli, mental associations and habit formation. Eventually, most young adults will show a heterosexual desire and a minority among them a homosexual or bisexual one, while specific perverse leanings can occur in both groups. Apart from a basic congenital predisposition, the triggers of perversion, Moll argued, can be found in psychological and environmental factors that obstruct the regular transformation of diffuse and erratic infantile inclinations into heterosexual object choice (Moll, 1897–98: 351, 421, 425, 474, 477, 491; see also Moll, 1898: 43–52, 55–7, 83, 325–6, 351, 420–9, 433–9, 469–70, 581; 1891a: 167; 1899: 374–5).

A striking parallel between the perspectives of Moll and Freud is that both distinguished homosexuality from the other perversions. It was not a coincidence that Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen started with a discussion of ‘inversion’, and that Moll’s line of reasoning in his Untersuchungen was a continuation of his argument in his earlier monograph about contrary sexual feeling (Moll, 1891a). Both authors put in perspective not only its pathological and degenerative nature, but also the current explanation of same-sex desire as a feature of a more comprehensive, physical, mental and behavioural gender-inversion – the idea that homosexual men are in several ways effeminate and lesbians masculine. Although they did not rule out that this was true for some homosexuals, they also noticed that many others were entirely masculine in their appearance and behaviour, whereas several effeminate men appeared to be heterosexual (Moll, 1897–98: 190, 193, 440; see also Freud, 1905: 7–9). Both Moll and Freud rejected Hirschfeld’s influential biological explanation of homosexuality in terms of a ‘third sex’ (Hirschfeld, 1899, 1914). Moll foreshadowed the separation of homosexuality, defined in terms of partner choice, from other forms of contrary sexual feeling (transvestitism, androgyny and transsexuality), which would be understood as gender anomalies rather than as sexual ones. Thus he began to problematize the usual understanding of sexual desire in terms of the attraction between the contrasting gender poles (Moll, 1898: 191, 440, 514–15).

Another consequential finding by Moll was that homosexuals did not fundamentally differ from heterosexuals in their sexual behaviour and feelings, including attraction and love towards a specific individual. He further suggested that both orientations were of the same kind by pointing out that other perversions occurred in a similar way among both groups. In this way, Moll highlighted the dichotomy of hetero- and homosexuality (with bisexuality in between) as the fundamental classification, with other perversions as subcategories (Moll, 1891a: 70–1, 90–2, 105, 122; Moll, 1898: 319–20, 496). Both Moll’s and Freud’s perspective reflected that the gender of one’s sexual partner was to become the organizing framework of modern sexuality, overshadowing taxonomies that started from the reproductive norm, and considered all aberrations from it in the same light. The focus on the sex of the sexual partner shifted the emphasis from the distinction between procreative and non-procreative sexual behaviour to that between relational and non-relational sexuality.

Moll’s judgement of homosexuality was just as ambivalent as Freud’s. They clearly upheld heterosexuality as the standard, but at the same time they seemed to acknowledge that relational object-choice and the associated values (intimacy, equality, empathy) were within reach of homosexuals and that, in this respect, the two orientations were equivalent. In contrast, other perversions (fetishism, masochism, sadism, voyeurism, exhibitionism and paedophilia) were considered as more objectionable. They were felt to be at odds with the requirements of consensual relational sexuality, not only because they mostly sidestep coitus, but even more because of the frequent involvement of non-consensual and unequal partners, unusual locations (outside the private bedroom), promiscuity and their partial focus on particular acts, objects and scenarios. Prioritizing the gender of the sexual partner, the hetero-homosexual dichotomy has led to a side-lining and obscuring of other motives and aims of sexual desire.

Against the background of the new relational norm, the evaluation of masturbation by Moll and Freud was also similar. They distanced themselves from the medical association of masturbation with serious mental and physical disorders, but both authors thought that a lasting, solitary fixation on sexual fantasy was far from harmless because it signalled a denial of relational sexuality. Like perversions, it had to be countered through the stimulation of healthy heterosexuality, the more so because their assumptions about the importance of psychosexual developmental in early life for the shaping of sexual orientation suggest that heterosexuality is not given by nature (Freud, 1898: 71–2; Moll, 1891a: 170–1; 1908: 83, 162–70, 174–7, 240–3, 259).

Moll further prefigured Freud’s approach by taking a nuanced stance in the ongoing discussion about the inborn versus acquired nature of perversion. It was difficult, he argued, to distinguish between these causal influences. He was sceptical about any biological and anatomical explanation that locates the sexual drive in some part of the body (the brain, nervous system, gonads or ovaries) or chemical process such as hormonal secretion. Fundamental inborn needs and impulses of the human body originating in evolution are no more than indefinite and unshaped preconditions, or, as Moll phrased it, certain ‘reaction-capacities’ and ‘reaction-modes’ (Moll, 1897–98: 474, 477, 491, 672; see also Moll, 1898: 53, 83, 88–93, 100, 128, 132, 155–9, 192, 214–16, 306–9, 375–6, 406–7, 471–82, 484, 497, 505–11, 581). The specific materialization of biological potentials hinges on external sensual stimuli, life experiences, patterns of behaviour, individual character, motivations, associations and memory traces, emotional attachments, as well as the broader influence of culture and history. Sexuality is neither completely determined by inborn nature nor entirely shaped by psychic processes and environmental influences, but is the result of the multifarious interaction of these factors. The most reliable indicators for the determination of sexual orientation are not the body and outward behaviour as such, but subjective inner life, in particular dreams and fantasies (Moll, 1898: 53, 83, 398–9, 574, 592–3, 619–25, 676–7, 692, 820).

Moll stressed that the psychic dimension of the libido enables its embedding in intimate relations. The Latin term contrectare for the attracting and affectionate component of the sexual drive is very appropriate, he remarked, because its original meaning refers not only to touching, but also to mentally focusing on something. Sexual functioning is more than just a spontaneous physiological process, and it depends on more than the physical ability to have intercourse, which is just a necessary precondition. Mental stimuli, such as imagination and fantasies, are crucial, and satisfaction of the sexual urge consists not only of physical release but also of emotional fulfilment (Moll, 1898: 29; 1905: 275–6). The sexual drive is not merely a blind, biological force, but also contains the seeds of its own moral and cultural elevation. According to Moll, it is in particular women’s penchant for constrained and relational sexuality that exerts a moderating influence on unruly male lust and advances the constructive role of the libido in personal as well as social life (Moll, 1904: 683, 692–3). His view of female sexuality was much more positive than that of Freud.

Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen has often been considered a break with naturalist thinking, since he pointed out that it takes a (vulnerable) developmental process and considerable psychic effort to transform the diffuse and unruly libido in such a way that it will focus on the genitals and aim for heterosexual coitus. Moll’s approach was similar, but neither he nor Freud went further to draw radical conclusions. While questioning the age-old telos of reproduction, they replaced it with another one: relational and coital sexuality, which they still tended to project back into nature. Moll suggested that most people reach heterosexuality because evolution has advanced the dominance of ‘reaction-capacities’ that favour this orientation in line with the mutual anatomical matching of the male and female sex-organs. Only a minority of individuals is born with a weakness of such capacities leading to a more or less fixed homosexual disposition and other perverse leanings (Moll, 1897–98: 221, 474, 477, 491; 1898: 239–51, 269–70, 274–8, 283, 301–2).

Freud’s explanation of the transformation of the polymorphous perverse libido into a clear-cut gender identity and sexual orientation culminating in coital heterosexuality is guided by a normative teleological logic, which was strengthened when he elaborated the Oedipus complex. He invoked the ‘intention of nature’ to underline the primacy of the transition, claiming that the genitals of the child ‘are destined to great things in the future’ and that their ‘coming pre-eminence was secured’ by the infant’s masturbatory activities, the increase of genital pleasure between the age of 8 and puberty, and the apparently spontaneous complementing during puberty of the maturing sex organs and the emerging psychic ‘love function’ (Freud 1905: 42, 57, 69, 75). The very characteristic of perversion, according to Freud and also Moll, is the lack of integration of means and goals. It has got stuck on partial and preparatory forms of lust, which have not developed beyond undirected infantile leanings and have become fixated ends in themselves, thereby abandoning closure in the blessing of coital orgasm (Freud, 1905: 12, 16, 21; Moll, 1897–98: 283).

Space restrictions do not allow discussion of further similarities between Moll’s and Freud’s understanding of sexuality, such as their evaluation of the strained relation between nature and culture, the inevitability of sexual repression for the sake of the civilized order; and also their comparisons of individual development and human evolution, in particular regarding Freud’s explanation of ‘organic repression’ as the effect of an evolved aversion to base animalistic sensations (Moll, 1897–98: 135; see also Moll, 1898: 377–81; Freud, 1905: 20–1, 34). ¹⁹ For both experts, it was clear that frustration, anxiety and inner conflicts are inherent in human sexuality and that any lasting harmony was a chimera. Moll (1898: 587) believed that it was a ‘common sense fact of life that the love impulse brings more sorrow than pleasure’.

To what extent Freud plagiarized Moll’s book remains unclear. Some of the new ideas were more widely shared in sexual science, and it is difficult to establish who exactly influenced whom. Freud could have encountered them through different routes, apart from Moll’s works: in particular from Fliess and, like Moll, from the writings of Krafft-Ebing, with whom both Moll and Freud had been in touch (Moll, 1891b; 1924a: iii–iv; 1936: 143–5). ²⁰ All the same, against his better judgement, Freud grossly overstated the originality of his Drei Abhandlungen, barely crediting others for what he learned from them. Since he read Moll’s Untersuchungen thoroughly, Freud must have been aware that most of his professed innovations had been articulated by Moll eight years earlier. The fact that Freud did not pay fair tribute to Moll casts doubt on his integrity. Or did he suffer from another attack of ‘cryptomnesia’: a form of amnesia rooted in the unwillingness to give up one’s claim to originality? ²¹

Aftermath

Until the end of his life, Moll continued to criticize psychoanalysis for its dubious methods, feeble empirical underpinnings, biased interpretations of case histories, arbitrary definitions of sexuality, and run-away ‘pansexual’ projections and fantasies (Moll, 1912: 881–5; 1924b, 469–88; 1936: 53–4, 74). Psychoanalysis had provoked a sexualized preoccupation with the searching scrutiny of inner life, which did more harm than good. There was no proof that psychoanalysts had cured patients; most of them tended to experience a worsening of their complaints while paying substantial fees to their analysts. In his memoir, Moll claimed that he saved many of his own patients from being ‘sexually analysed’ in the Freudian mode and that psychoanalysis was a passing fashion, which would soon be regarded as irrelevant. This proved to be a miscalculation because by the 1930s Moll’s work had clearly been eclipsed by the rising impact of psychoanalysis.

Moll also mocked psychoanalysis by suggesting that the therapy was not much more than a series of tricks that could be learned without much effort. During the outbreak of World War I, the German Colonial Office asked him to train a layman for immediate medical duty in a few days. After finding out that the man had a lively imagination, Moll decided that the only expertise that could be taught quickly was psychoanalysis. Had not Freud himself claimed that a medical education was hardly necessary for becoming an analyst? Moll explained to his trainee some major psychoanalytic terms such as ‘conversion’, ‘repression’ and the ‘subconscious’, and the sexual nature of dream symbols, which simply implied that all elongated objects referred to the penis and all openable objects to the vagina. His instruction was successful, Moll smirked: the man served his country loyally as a psychoanalyst (Moll, 1936: 192–3).

The animosity between Freud and Moll did not prevent the latter from inviting the former, in 1913, to join the Internationale Gesellschaft für Sexualforschung, in which Moll played a leading role (Jones, 1955: 104). This society was to serve as the rival organization of the Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Sexualwissenschaft und Eugenik, initiated earlier in that same year by, among others, Hirschfeld. According to Moll and his associates, the latter organization was motivated by leftist and populist politics and dominated by a one-sided biomedical approach, whereas their society was the truly scientific and politically neutral one and also provided scope for a cultural perspective on sexuality (Marcuse, 1914). Apparently, Freud and Abraham were eager to introduce psychoanalysis in both organizations in order to bring it to the attention of medical circles (Abraham and Freud, 1965: 67, 108, 149). During the first meeting of the International Society, however, Freud’s view of infantile sexuality and its role in the aetiology of neuroses was disparaged (Marcuse, 1914: 294–5). Accordingly, Freud declined Moll’s invitation (Jones, 1955: 104), and the same happened in 1926 when Freud and Jones were invited to take a seat on the international committee of the International Conference on Sexological Research that Moll, supported by the German government, organized in Berlin (Moll, 1926; 1936: 228–34). The upcoming event was widely covered in newspapers, and at a press conference Moll once more antagonized Freud, according to Jones (1957: 127), because he used ‘abusive language’ about psychoanalysis.

In the 1920s Moll began to suffer from chronic health problems – another parallel with Freud, who was diagnosed with cancer of his jawbone in 1923 – and he became increasingly embittered (Moll, 1936: 281; see also Goerke, 1965: 239). Moll’s friend Max Dessoir noticed that, under the influence of his ailments and consumption of morphine, he had become ‘downright malicious’. ‘Dealing with him was difficult . . . The lightest dissent made him erupt and talk over the opponent ruthlessly . . . he frightened and tantalized people whose sore points he knew’ (Dessoir, 1947: 128–9). Moll showed his worst side in particular in his feud with Hirschfeld, his main rival with regard to leadership in German sexology. He again and again degraded the work and activities of Hirschfeld, accusing him of misusing science for harmful homosexual agitation and propaganda. Moll’s hinting at Hirschfeld’s ‘problematic nature’ (meaning his homosexuality), on which Moll claimed to ‘have a lot of material’ that he would not publish unless forced to do so, makes it clear that Moll’s treatment of Hirschfeld was even worse than what Freud did to Moll (Moll, 1927: 321–5). In 1934, when Hirschfeld, after a world tour and afraid to return to his home country under Nazi rule, was trying to continue his work in France, Moll completed the character assassination. In a letter he sent to the Dean of the Medical Faculty in Paris, with a copy to the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he not only questioned Hirschfeld’s expertise, but also again tacitly brought up his homosexuality. Hirschfeld’s assertion that he could not return to Germany because of his Jewish background and social-democratic affiliations was, according to Moll, a cover-up for the true reason for his exile: his ‘misconduct in a totally different direction’ (Sigusch, 1995; 2008: 197–200, 218–33).

Whereas Freud took refuge in Britain after the German occupation of Austria in 1938, Moll decided to stay in Berlin. Since World War I, his political orientation had shifted from progressive and international leanings to more conservative nationalism, which may explain his naïvety about his fate as a Jew in the Third Reich. Despite his efforts to keep in with the Nazis, as nationalist and homophobic statements in his autobiography suggest, his medical license was withdrawn (Moll, 1936: 65–6, 151–3, 196, 206, 210–28, 231; Winckelmann, 1996). Lonely, impoverished and largely forgotten by the outside world, he died in Berlin on 23 September 1939, on exactly the same day as his – by then world-famous – arch-enemy in London.