Historians of sexuality in central Europe have long struggled with the texts produced in the fin-de-siècle and the difficulty inherent in characterizing the kinds of science practiced by their authors. Often, what was a respectable scientific approach at the time strikes the modern reader as hopelessly compromised and subjective. Historians of eugenics, in particular, have done heavy lifting trying to contextualize the thinking of these historical actors and the ways in which their work fit in with the larger scientific community. Katie Sutton now enters this conversation with a book that looks at the relationship between psychoanalysis and sexology, two oft-maligned schools of thought, as they developed at the turn of the century in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Laying out an impressive set of contemporary concerns and a sensitive plan for treating her primary sources, Sutton proposes that these two medical forms of knowledge overlapped, competed, informed each other, and ultimately parted ways throughout her period of study. Psychoanalysis and sexology were never “just about sex”; they were ways of understanding subjectivity and the self, and therefore of the utmost importance to readers and thinkers of the period. Thus, although Sutton's book may be about the production of sexual knowledge, it often interacts with larger questions of what humans are meant to be and do.

The main actors of her book include the famous—Sigmund Freud, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Helene Stöcker—as well as the less well-known researchers and activists who changed the way we thought and wrote and researched about sex and the self. Sutton follows these actors as they query the normal and the pathological variations of human sexual development. Of particular interest is her ability to track them as they self-sort into associations and movements. Using the metaphor of trading zones, Sutton re-creates the reciprocal dialogue, exchange of ideas, and interpenetration of concepts crossing disciplinary lines in the early years of her study. She then shows how the two schools of thought diverged with the growth of hormone research in the 1910s.

Sex Between Body and Mind is structured so that we begin with Freud and his Three Essays on Sexuality, exploring psychoanalysis and childhood sexuality. The book segues into pre-1914 debates on homosexuality, and then takes as its midpoint a chapter on the war itself and the treatment of shell-shock. The real hinge of the book, however, is chapter 4, which is devoted to research on “inner secretions” and hormone therapy. This is a bold move. These works are often the most impenetrable to modern readers and the easiest to reject as unscientific. Rather than dismissing this body of research, Sutton makes it the center of her argument. Psychoanalysis, which had been running pretty close to sexology throughout the book, could not countenance hormonal research (although Freud himself underwent a Steinach treatment) as a replacement for the environmental and interpersonal influences on the psyche. Sexology, on the other hand, was much more sanguine about incorporating chemical factors in its toolkit of explanatory models for the self and, in fact, reveled in this new source of disciplinary legitimacy. Sexology embraced its own medicalization; psychoanalysis had a more ambiguous relationship to medicine and fewer opportunities to be incorporated into it. Sutton's final two chapters trace the conversations about female and transvestite sexuality in the interwar period. The latter uses community journals as sources, a welcome divergence from the medical texts that dominate the book.

Sutton has read and processed an enormous amount of dense, often reworked and re-edited material from famously difficult authors. Her book is a comparative cultural history based in discursive analysis and is executed with verve and empathy. Doing this kind of history, though, opens up the question of the role of place in the history of ideas. At times, Sutton struggles to bring Berlin and Vienna alive with the kind of context that would complement the deep readings she gives the cities’ authors and activists. A related question might be whether sexology (and even psychoanalysis) was always meant to be all about the individual; what, for example, were the projected needs of the community and the state at the time? Particularly after World War I, cities like Vienna were very concerned with the “healthy” sexuality of their citizens. We get some sense of these communal needs from Sutton's investigation of war veterans, but more would be welcome. Finally, much of this literature interacted with the question of “racial hygiene.” Sutton acknowledges this early in the book but does not explore this node of knowledge production.

These observations, however, do not detract from the author's excellent labor in tackling a body of historical literature that is exceedingly difficult and often dismissed. Sutton's book is exciting and brings clarity at the same time. The author has done a great service to cultural historians and historians of sexuality in taking on these questions and tracing these personages. As always, attending to the questions of how we came to our understanding of what was normal and what was pathological is a challenging and important story. Our health and happiness hang in the balance.