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Notes
Neither Tannenbaum nor Solomon cited actual cases. The third edition of Stedman’s (1914) A Practical Medical Dictionary already has voyeurism as “A morbid desire to look at the sexual organs or other usually clothed parts of the body of one of the opposite sex” (p. 1024). The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia’s 1909 Supplement had mixoscopia as “a form of sexual perversion in which libidinous pleasure is excited by the sight, or mental picture, of the cohabitation of the desired one with another” (Smith, 1909, p. 816).
The passage was excerpted in the next year’s Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale (Vol. 9, 1858, pp. 216–231). Lexicographer-historian Virmaître (1890) dated the term voyeurs back to “at least 1862,” reiterating that “there is a whole class of people who pay huge prices to satisfy their lust or erotic madness [folie érotique]. Madness [Folie] is not an exaggerated expression, for one must be seriously mad to have such a passion; the people who possess it certainly are more the purview of college than that of the correctional police” (pp. 151–152). I have not seen an erotological use of voyeur in French before 1883.
Former Surgeon General of the United States Army William A. Hammond (1887) does not mention voyeurs but does describe a class of men in the habit of producing spontaneous orgasm by the mere sight of women in public. “There appears to be a sort of association, or fellowship, with signs, by which they know each other” (p. 71).
Krafft-Ebing adapted his diagnostic term Stercoracismus (appearing in an 1894 article) from Taxil’s slang term stercoraires, “to whom an excrement is a delicious dish, one might even say voluptuous” (Taxil, 1884, p. 166), and of whom some were “platonic” in terms of only wanting to observe.
Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) never revised or expanded on this single short paragraph on voyeurs and never discussed specific cases. His student Fuchs notably added one case study to a posthumous edition of Psychopathia sexualis (von Krafft-Ebing, 1907, see pp. 385-386), of a man who at the age of 23 had observed his friends being intimate with puellas in Paris, and from then onward became a preferential looker, drilling holes in doors and paying for the privilege. Another reviewer of Moll writes he “does not believe that this word [Mixoskopie] will become naturalized and he cannot see the benefit of coining new and exotic names for any new sexual perversion, of which there are probably innumerable” (Behr, 1892, p. 197).
The former rendering has been characterized as “the result of an intriguing translation blunder,” and both renderings as a monstrous “betrayal of Freudian thought,” in all “a particularly striking example of the absurd errors that can be passed on from text to text” (de Mijolla, 2005, p. 1553).
Lacassagne (1890) noted that by the time of the voyeur’s entry into German nosology, Lasègue’s neologism exhibitionniste (“exhibitionist”) had become “successful and popularized [vulgarisé]” (p. 11) in French. In English, the steady rise in popularity of loanword voyeur and of voyeurism hardly began until around 1940 (Google Ngram), in part reflecting the post-WW2 transdisciplinary hegemony of psychoanalytic theory in the Anglosphere.
Frustrated by the term’s broadness, Kiernan (1920) proposed the monstrous term mixoscopolagny (pp. 43, 45) in one of his sexology trivia columns to denote “sexual excitement from vision or imagery of coitus in others;” but seemingly no one ever used the term. Compare Kiernan’s 1917 term automixoscopia (“automixoscopic iconolagny”) in reference to men having themselves “photographed in all sorts of lascivious positions and [showing] the photographs to others in a boastful manner” (Kiernan, 1920, p. 45).
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Janssen, D.F. “Voyeuristic Disorder”: Etymological and Historical Note. Arch Sex Behav 47, 1307–1311 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1199-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1199-2