Infantile hysteria and infantile sexuality in late nineteenth-century German-language medical literature.

BECAUSE one focus of Freud's work was his theory of infantile sexuality, there has been some interest in identifying other nineteenth-century writers who discussed this phenomenon.' Also, because of Freud's early papers on male hysteria, there has been interest in nineteenth-century beliefs about the occurrence of hysteria in males.2 Curiously enough, however, almost no one seems to have paid much attention to the significant body of nineteenth-century medical literature on infantile hysteria.3 Yet, in German-language medical literature of the second half of the century, infantile hysteria regularly received more attention than male hysteria and it was usually associated with infantile sexuality. Moreover, some earlier sources that Freud acknowledged in his work on infantile sexuality are from this literature.4 The discus-