I got ahold of some notes from a "Criminal Psychiatry" class by a "Dr. De River" class, circa 1948; includes terms I've never heard of ("trivity", "Urnings", "Urvids"). Does this accurately reflect the views of sex and criminality in other mental health fields at that time? Is this from a "quack"?

by KillYourTV

This is five pages from what I assume was a class my father took either when he was in the LAPD Police Academy or while working for his police science degree at Cal State Los Angeles. (Images of the five pages can be seen here.)

The main thrust of my question is this: would I get the same information if I were to go to a mainstream university or school of psychiatry, or was the information that police got significantly different?

Some takeaways from the notes:

  • "Homosexuals not born"
  • "Probably caused by environment and possibly weak emotional senses.
  • "Homosexuals usually dominated in family by mother or some women."
  • Reference to "Urnings" and "Urnids".
  • "Trivity--advanced cases between women."
  • Interesting spelling of common terms: "sodimy", "fallatio", "bisectual", "narcism".
  • "Metotrophic -- Intermediate between homos and normal person."
Noble_Devil_Boruta

I wouldn't say the notes are based on any sort of 'quackery' other than the lackluster approach to the topic itself, what should be obvious given the background of Dr. De River, as already presented by u/PurpleAntifreeze. This explains the usage of both contemporary and relatively obscure or outdated terms, suggesting an amateur-level knowledge of the psychosexuology and forensic psychiatry, very likely shaped by several prominent books that gained popularity among specialists and laymen alike.

I would wager, however, that the notes themselves might have been made by someone not familiar with the subject or at least with the literature on the subject, resulting in haphazard spelling of less common psychological or anatomical terms, possibly following the phonetic forms (e.g. 'bisectual' instead of 'bisexual', 'clivorus' instead of 'clitoris', 'effeminent' instead of 'effeminate', 'agrmaphroditism' instead of 'hermaphroditism' and possibly 'ibitance' instead of 'impotence'). Personally, I would attribute such errors to lack of medical knowledge and a limited exposure to Latin (misspelled term 'Satyriasis' should be obvious to any classically-educated person, medical background or not) - a very possible scenario in case of the text being dictated to someone with no medical background or interests or typed from hardly legible notes by such person, as it is unlikely for a surgeon to make obvious mistakes in medical terminology.

The term 'Urnings' has been introduced to scholarship (not psychology per se, as such branch of knowledge won't solidify until the last decade of the century) in the mid-1860s by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, German lawyer and amateur scholar who laid in his book Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe the groundwork for the theory of what we call today sexual orientation and identity, possibly inspired by the concept of 'sex of the soul' presented by Heinrich Hössli, Swiss tailor and writer. Ulrichs' theories were groundbreaking at the time, because he not only posited that sexual contacts between people of the same sex might be natural (i.e. resulting from a sexual drive rather than from pure searching for pleasure or a mental disorder) and not accompanied with heterosexual drive, but also openly advocated decriminalization of the homosexual acts between men and proposed the acceptance of the same-sex marriages. His ideas were apparently too radical to be accepted, and his lectures often led to scandals, but his work was nevertheless continued and further developed by German sexologist and psychologist, Magnus Hirschfeld.

In his theory, Ulrichs juxtaposed 'Dionings', or people whose sex drive attracts them towards people of opposite sex (equivalent to modern term 'heterosexual') and Urnings (people attracted to people of the same sex). The terms themselves were taken from Greek mythological figures, Dione (according to some myths, mother to Aphrodite) and Uranus, respectively. The terms had both male and female variants in original German, thus rendered as 'Uning' and 'Urnid'. He also introduced the category of 'Uranodionings' or, as one can easily guess, people attracted to both sexes (today 'bisexuals'). It is worth noting that the terms we commonly used today are more or less contemporary to Ulrich, having been created around 1870 by Karoly Maria Kertbeny, an Austrian-Hungarian physician, but started to gain popularity only after the publication of Psychopatia Sexualis by Kraft-Ebbing. It is worth mentioning that Ulrichs was one of the first scholars who proposed the idea that the physical sex and sexual drive are two completely different factors and are developed independently (or semi-independently) what meant that e.g. homosexuality is a rare, albeit completely natural trait (he estimated that it appears in 0.5-1% of general population). He also proposed an idea that what we call today sexual orientation is a congenital, not an acquired trait (what is directly opposed by the quoted notes, suggesting only cursory knowledge of the Ulrichs' theories, possibly limited to the foreign-sounding terms).

Although people like aforementioned Hössli, Ulrichs and Hirschfeld (or Havelock Ellis for that matter) managed to provide additional perspective in the field of sexology, the pathological interpretation of homosexuality (especially among men, as female homosexuality was a topic that was relatively rarely discussed in medical literature), present in European medicine since Antiquity (vide Soranus of Ephesus or Caelius Aurelianus), has been very prominent also in 19th century. For example, The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases by Alexander Morison published in 1833 or Compendium der Psychiatrie by Emil Kraepelin from 1883 defined homosexuality as a mental condition. Similarly, Richard von Kraft-Ebbing, author of Psychopatia Sexualis, a book that was published in 1886 and is largely considered a first forensic psychology manual, although considered homosexual orientation a congenital rather than acquired trait, he described it as a pathological state nonetheless (he considered them a 'cerebral neurosis' in the form of paresthesia, i.e. 'sexual drive focused on inappropriate object'). Sigmund Freud, whose theories significantly shaped the pre-war psychology, although not considered homosexuality pathological per se, still though it to be a result of stunted psychosexual development, eventually contributing to the unfavourable treatment of this orientation.

American medical authorities in early 2nd half of the 20th century followed the pathological interpretation, classifying homosexuality as a pathological condition (sexual deviation, among fetishism, pedophilia or sadism) in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published in 1952. In the second edition of the manual (DSM-II) issued in 1968, homosexuality was a separate diagnostic unit defined as 'aberrant sexual orientation'. The latter classification was short-lived, however, because in 1973 American Psychiatric Association decided to remove homosexuality from DSM. It made a limited comeback in the DSM-III (1980), where it existed as 'ego-dystonic homosexuality', similar to modern term of 'gender dysphoria' and referring to the difficulties in acceptance of one's homosexuality. This unit has been however removed again in the revised edition of the manual (DSM-III-R), published in 1987. These changes were mirrored in the decisions of WHO that removed homosexuality from the 10th edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) in 1990.

So, to sum it up, the academicians specializing in psychiatry or psychology would have most definitely been taught the issue in much greater detail, quite possibly including both salutative and pathological concepts of homosexuality, although the consensus in the 1940s and 1950s USA was that it had the latter character. Nevertheless, even in 1948, no competent forensic psychiatry course would treat topics of sexuality in such arbitrary, cursory way. Although it is hard to say with certainty, given the scarcity of the material, usage of mid-19th century terms and e.g. definition of 'pervertion' as any sexual act with no procreative potential that seems to be lifted verbatim from Kraft-Ebbing strongly suggest that the notes are more similar to what students of forensic psychiatry would have been learning half a century prior, rather in mid-20th century.