L’Amour morbide

How a transient mental illness became defunct

Bibliographic Data

ID12902509
AuthorsAlison Downham Moore (0000-0002-9642-1437, Western Sydney University, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume29
Issue2
Pages291-312
Publication date2017-11-22
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIntellectual History Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1749-6977 • E-ISSN: 1749-6985
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17496977.2017.1374078
OpenAlexW2769207752
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited21

Across a broad range of late nineteenth-century French medical texts that described the newly denoted sexual pathologies of frigidity, inversion, fetishism, nymphomania, sadism and masochism, one finds a term being used for which no current equivalent exists. This term is l’amour morbide – morbid love. Its use was initially as common in respectable medical texts as it later became in erotic fictional writings. In some cases, it appeared to refer to a particular sexual pathology, albeit one which troubled the very notion of perversion as aberrant or abnormal. This article considers the role that l’amour morbide played in the sorting of medical terminology for describing sexual perversions in late nineteenth-century France, and examines what its relationship was to degenerationist thought. Engaging with Ian Hacking’s notion of “transient mental illnesses” produced by unique cultural ecologies, it is proposed that morbid love occupied the space between decadent culture of fin-de-siècle France on the one hand, and on the other hand degenerationist frames adopted by French doctors in the context of international medical and psychiatric conversations

Mental health · Mental illness · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Transient (computer programming · Computer Science · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Psychology

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