Citation

Janssen DF. Hist. Psychiatry 2019; ePub(ePub): 957154X19864490.

Affiliation

Maastricht University (external PhD program), The Netherlands.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0957154X19864490

PMID

31328573

Abstract

The ostensibly bizarre crime of braid-cutting invited occasional alienist inferences from the late 1850s onwards, until it entered mid-1880s police profiles and forensic-psychiatric taxonomies as a corollary of perversion, specifically sadism and fetishism. Cases were rare, but were reported as late as the mid-1930s and enduringly cited as encompassing a staple variety of fetishism. This note briefly reconstructs entries in German, French and English forensic psychiatry, sexual psychopathology and psychoanalysis.

Language: en

Keywords

Braid-cutting; Jack the Clipper; forensic psychiatry; hair fetishism; perversion; sexuality