Philosophy in the English Boudoir: Havelock Ellis, Love and Pain, and Sexological Discourses on Algophilia

It is well known among historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexuality that Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) made a number of important advances in sex psychology, among them writing the first English medical textbook on homosexuality and devising the concepts of auto-erotism and narcissism. This essay, which examines Ellis's less frequently cited book, Love and Pain (first edition, 1903; second edition, 1913), attempts to answer a number of questions about how his study of algolagnia fit into the emerging field of sexology. How did sexologists and other medical professionals treat the phenomenon of pain related to sexuality? What sources of knowledge informed and at the same time constrained Ellis? How did he use the concepts, methods, and tropes that were acceptable to contemporary sexologists? In what ways did he rework earlier discourses in his own research? How did others interested in algolagnia receive Ellis's contributions? As a caveat, I should note that this essay is an intellectual and not a social or cultural history. Consequently, I am not concerned with the "real lives" of algophiliacs; nor do I try to generate a pervasive model of "cultural context" that somehow influenced Ellis; nor do I read Ellis's work against such a context, seeking similarities between his ideas and other cultural manifestations. But I am interested in how sexological knowledge is acquired and disseminated and how knowledge claims become superseded. When that [End Page 275] happens, of course, the claims cease to be knowledge and become errors of the past.1 This is the basis of scientific change.2 Many of Ellis's specific contributions to sexology derive from the fact that he was an exponent of English radical secularism and used science to fortify his claims about sexual liberation. The way that Ellis treated algolagnia was affected by this political viewpoint. He argued that phenomena such as pain were related to so-called normal sexual desires, thereby implying that society's definition of "normal" sexualities should be altered so as to include algophiliacs rather than stigmatizing these individuals as "perverse."3 Additional aspects of Love and Pain are also worth addressing. One of these is the way that Ellis enhanced the respectability of his work by piggybacking on the growth of medical specialties at the end of the nineteenth century. Lesley Hall has argued that English doctors were reluctant to write about sex because it had such a low status in the nineteenth-century medical world.4 While this may be so, we should remember that at that time physicians regarded medical texts about sexuality more favorably than they did nonmedical texts written for political or prurient purposes.5 Consequently, we must consider the format of Ellis's work if we are to appreciate how he was treated in the wider field of medicine. In sum, if we are to understand how and why Ellis wrote reformist works about sex that engaged a medical and secular rather than a religious audience, then we must address the multiple questions raised above. Sexology and the Discourses on Algolagnia By examining the studies of algolagnia that appeared before the publication of Love and Pain, we can discover the stock of knowledge that Havelock Ellis could draw upon as well as the parameters of statements that were acceptable within the field of sexology. As others have convincingly shown, any new claim within a field of knowledge has to negotiate the prevailing discourses in that field. Texts are not written in a vacuum but rather are [End Page 276] situated in existing intellectual fields.6 Many of Ellis's precursors conceived of algolagnic phenomena as consisting of two distinct phases, active and passive, often referred to as sadism and masochism, respectively. Ellis himself withdrew from this position by showing how the two spheres interrelated; in doing so he anticipated some later sexologists...