Known for Penile plethysmograph
Name Kurt Freund
Institutions Clarke Institute of Psychiatry
Alma mater Charles University in Prague
Died October 23, 1996, Toronto, Canada
Education Charles University in Prague
Kurt Freund (17 January 1914 – 23 October 1996) was a Czech-Canadian physician and sexologist best known for developing phallometry (the objective measurement of sexual arousal in males), research studies in pedophilia, and for the "courtship disorder" hypothesis as a taxonomy of certain paraphilias (voyeurism, exhibitionism, toucherism, frotteurism, and what he called "preferential rape").
Freund was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Chrudim, then part of Austrian Bohemia, later Czechoslovakia, now in the Czech Republic. He married Anna Hlounová, a non-Jewish Czech pianist and music teacher, on 13 January 1942. In 1943, they divorced in order to protect Anna and their newborn daughter Helen from anti-Jewish and anti-miscegenation legislation implemented by the German Nazi Occupators. They remarried after the war in 1945, and Anna gave birth to a son, Peter, in 1948. Many of Freund's relatives died during the Holocaust, including his parents Heinrich and Hella, and his brother Hans.
Career in Europe
Freund is best known for being the first to apply plethysmography (measurement of bloodflow) to the penis, thus permitting the first objective measurement of sexual arousal in males. Over his career, he refined the penile plethysmograph as part of a broad program of research on male sexual interest. The device remains controversial, and indeed Freund published articles acknowledging its limitations. Among other concerns, sexual offenders could sometimes suppress arousal through concentration or surreptitiously causing themselves pain, similar to methods for producing false results on a polygraph (lie detector). However, Freund still felt that the plethysmograph remained the best measure of arousal (there was no evidence that subjects could consistently fake arousal, though they could sometimes suppress it.) Other researchers and activists dispute PPG as the best measure of orientation, pointing out that neither identity nor behavior are perfectly correlated with measured or self-reported arousal. Freund acknowledged this, and in fact demonstrated it in his studies, but maintained that orientation per se was best defined as the object of arousal.
Freund was initially commissioned to use penile plethysmography to detect recruits attempting to evade military service by falsely claiming to be homosexual. (The Czechoslovak Army barred homosexuals from serving.) His larger research program, however, focused on detection and diagnosis of sex offenders, particularly preference pedophiles, with a view to more appropriate treatment guidelines. Freund was also involved in administering conversion therapy: "Freund made a large-scale attempt in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s to change the sexual orientation of homosexuals to a heterosexual orientation through the use of behavioral aversive therapy." His empirical data also showed some of the first evidence that sexual orientation conversion therapy was generally futile. He demonstrated that even homosexually oriented men who appeared to have given up sexual relations with other men and established heterosexual marriages were still aroused by images of men rather than women. Freund also challenged contemporary psychoanalytic theories of male homosexuality that suggested it was due to a fear or aversion to women. Freund concluded that homosexual men simply lacked erotic interest in females. Based on these studies, he advocated the decriminalization of homosexuality in Czechoslovakia (which took place in 1961) and the end of conversion therapy. These opinions also put him out of favor with the psychoanalytically dominated psychiatric establishment in Toronto, as he continued to argue that homosexuals needed understanding and acceptance rather than treatment.
Freund also contributed to the idea of a genetic origin of homosexuality by including in his book a study of identical twins who have almost always the same sexual orientation (heterosexual or homosexual). This part of his contribution is not widely known in the West. (See his book Homosexualita u muže, Praha 1962.)
Freund received his M.D. at Charles University of Prague, and later a D.Sc. degree there in 1962. He carried out post-doctoral research and later both research and clinical work at Charles University's Sexological Institute.
Career in Canada
Freund fled to Canada in 1968, in the wake of the Prague Spring. Freund then began plethysmography studies of male sexual orientation at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (then called the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry) in Toronto, where much of the research and published data using PPG originated. The Kurt Freund Laboratory at that centre is named after him. There was controversy regarding potential abuses of devices to measure sexual interests, following fears that it might lead to discrimination against gay men. Phallometric testing has been shown, however, to be one of the most accurate, if not the single most accurate, methods of identifying the sexual offenders that are most likely to commit new sexual offenses against children. On the other hand, another study concluded that "although the validity of the technique for research and clinical assessment is now established, justification for the routine use of the technique must await a proper standardization of the technique and the publication of reliable norms."
Freund was diagnosed with cancer in 1994 and was a member of Dying with Dignity. When his health deteriorated in 1996, he committed suicide by taking a lethal cocktail of muscle relaxants, sleeping pills and wine. Freund was cremated, and his ashes were scattered on the lawn across from his office at the Clarke Institute in Toronto and on the grounds of Psychiatric Hospital Bohnice in Prague, where he had worked for many years in Czechoslovakia.