Penile Plethysmograph - Development

Development

The original volumetric was developed during the 1950s by Kurt Freund in then-Czechoslovakia. Freund later wrote, "In the early fifties homosexual interaction was still an indictable offense in Czechoslovakia. I was of course opposed to this measure, but I still thought, as did my colleagues at the psychiatric university hospital in Prague where I was working, that homosexuality was an experientially acquired neurosis" (p. 223) He then developed phallometry to replace psychoanalytic methods of assessment because "sychoanalysis had turned out to be a failure, virtually unusable as an instrument for individual diagnosis or research....When phallometry began to look promising as a test of erotic sex and age preferences, we started using it mainly as a test of pedophilia, that is determining who has an erotic preference for children over adults" (p. 223-224).

In post-World-War-II Czechoslovakia, Freund was assigned by the communist government the task of identifying among military conscripts men who were falsely declaring themselves to be gay. "Freund (1957) developed the first device, which measured penile volume changes... to distinguish heterosexual and homosexual males for the Czechoslovakian army." When he escaped Europe for Canada, Freund was able to pursue his research using phallometry for the assessment of sexual offenders. At that time, attempts to develop methods of changing homosexual men into heterosexual men were being made by many sexologists, including John Bancroft, Albert Ellis, and William Masters of the Masters and Johnson Institute. Because phallometry showed that such methods were failures, Freund was among the first sexologists to declare that such attempts were unethical.