Basic Types of Sexual  Behavior

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767 -1835), the great German scholar and university reformer, was the first modern writer to provide a morally neutral classification of human sexual behavior.

Wilhelm von Humboldt, in 1826/27, sketched the outline of a major sexological study “The History of Dependency in the Human Race”. In it, he planned to investigate the history of “the procreative drive” and that of prostitution. The work was never completed, but in his sketch Humboldt, for the first time, introduced a morally neutral classification of human sexual behavior according to its four possible objects:

1. Self
2. Other sex
3. Same sex
4. Animal

This classification is still helpful today for a general introduction to a very complex issue, and we will therefore use it in the following sections of this course. However, following the current scientific terminology, we will speak in the second and third cases of “heterosexual” and “homosexual intercourse” (the prefixes “hetero-“ and “homo-“ simply mean “different” and “same” in Greek).