Treatment 2: Psychology

We announced in the previous chapter that we were going to use the moral–physical opposition as a conceptual entrée into psychological treatments of frigidity as they developed at the very end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth. We will begin that task by considering some new terms that maintained a version of the dichotomy while also reshaping and reconceiving it. The emergence of such expressions was quite a widespread discursive event, affecting at least the three languages — French, English and German — on which we are focused in these two chapters. We have already had occasion to discuss William Hammond’s use of ‘mental’ rather than ‘moral’ in certain contexts, and will soon come to consider in detail some significant terminological developments in German, but before doing so we will consider briefly the professional discourse of a later French alienist, Henri Legrand du Saulle.