Albert Moll (German psychiatrist)
Albert Moll (German: [mɔl]; 4 May 1862, Lissa – 23 September 1939, Berlin) was a German psychiatrist and, together with Iwan Bloch and Magnus Hirschfeld, the founder of modern sexology. Moll believed sexual nature involved two entirely distinct parts: sexual stimulation and sexual attraction.
Moll divided the sexual response into four phases:
- The onset
- The equable voluptuous sensation
- The voluptuous acme
- The sudden diminution and cessation of the voluptuous sensation
After the death of hypnotism's founder, James Braid, in 1860, Moll was one of a handful of people who continued serious research into the subject. Moll published his account of the history of hypnotism and his own experiments in Hypnotism, 1889, in preparation of which he was assisted by support from Prof. August Forel and Dr. Max Dessoir.
Moll was a firm believer in hypnotism, and a strong critic of mysticism, occultism and spiritualism. Even though he studied parapsychical research he was critical of it and offered naturalistic psychological explanations for paranormal phenomena. He frequently indulged in the unmasking of mediums and séances.
His book Christian Science, Medicine, and Occultism (1902) is an early text on anomalistic psychology. In the book Moll criticised practices such as Christian Science, Spiritualism and occultism and wrote they were the result of fraud and hypnotic suggestion. He argued that suggestion explained the cures of Christian Science, as well as the apparently supernatural rapport between magnetisers and their somnambulists. He wrote that fraud and hypnotism could explain mediumistic phenomena. According to (Wolffram, 2012) "[Moll] argued that the hypnotic atmosphere of the darkened séance room and the suggestive effect of the experimenters’ social and scientific prestige could be used to explain why seemingly rational people vouchsafed occult phenomena."
- Moll, Albert. (1912). The Sexual life of the Child Macmillan, New York, (pp. 22–23) (original in German 1908).
- Moll, Albert. (1889). Hypnotism. Preface to first edition, pp. ix-x.
- Moll, Albert. (1889). Der Hypnotismus Kornfeld, Berlin.
- Moll, Albert. (1902). Christian Science, Medicine, and Occultism. (translated by F.J. Rebman) Rebman Ltd, London.
- Wolffram, Heather (2012). Trick, Manipulation and Farce: Albert Moll’s Critique of Occultism. Medical History 56(2): 277-295.
- Bullough, Vern L. and Bullough. Bonnie (eds.) (1994) "Moll, Albert (1862-1939)" Human Sexuality: An encyclopedia Garland Publishing, New York, ISBN 0-8240-7972-8 ;
- Modern Views of Sexual Emotion - Albert Moll (published 1957);
- Albert Moll biography (Humboldt University of Berlin);
- Works by Albert Moll at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Albert Moll at Internet Archive (search optimized for the non-Beta site)
- Media related to Albert Moll at Wikimedia Commons
- Works related to The Sexual Life of the Child at Wikisource
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