Psychiatric Resistance to the Medicalization of Sin

Building on the previous chapter, this one zooms in on the role of psychiatry in stimulating the discourse of homosexuality. Comparing developments in France to those in Belgium, it demonstrates how, in the former, a rising psychiatric profession latched onto sexual psychopathology to help establish medical control over the largely Catholic system of insane asylums in close alliance with an anticlerical state. The homosexual ‘invert’ thus served as an emblem of secularism. Belgium’s political culture, by contrast, was dominated by Catholics and laissez-faire liberals, neither of whom could support state expansion in the realm of mental health care, which the former dominated and the latter approached as a business. The country’s insane asylums would remain firmly in the hands of religious congregations and private entrepreneurs, stunting the development of an independent, confident, and militant psychiatry. Dominated by Catholics, the Belgian Society of Mental Medicine was hostile to new-fangled ideas about ‘sexual inversion.’ This is shown through the growing skepticism of its members to the work of the pioneering Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who increasingly came to see ‘contrary sexual feeling’ as an innate and morally innocent ‘condition.’