This motif thereafter haunted a wide range of intellectual attempts to account for torture, genocide and war. The central motif in such definitions of perversion is the binding of sex to historical teleology - the notion that perversions can be aligned to progress, civilization and barbarism. Sexual Myths of Modernity reconsiders the intellectual milieux in which the Viennese psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing formulated the neologisms 'Sadismus' and 'Masochismus', and presents a revised understanding of the character of Sigmund Freud's uptake of these terms. Sadism as fascistic, masochism as postmodern - these are the sexual myths associated with modernity which this book critiques via an historical account of their discursive emergence.
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