No freedoms in the critical sense: An interview with Volkmar Sigusch on the dawn of critical sexology
Stefan Hain
Platypus Review 188 | July–August 2026
In 2018, Platypus Affiliated Society member Stefan Hain interviewed Volkmar Sigusch (1940–2023), who was considered one of the most important sex researchers in the world. From 1973 to 2006, he was Director of the Institute for Sexual Science at the clinic of the J. W. Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, as well as Professor of Special Sociology (Sociology of Sexuality) at the Department of Social Sciences in Frankfurt am Main. Sigusch co-founded the International Academy of Sex Research in 1973 and the Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung in 1988. His book Results in Sexual Medicine (1972)[1] was the first in the world to include “Sexual Medicine” in its title. His book The Mystification of Sex (1984)[2] was included in the Universal Philosophical Encyclopedia in 1992 as a work of the century.[3] For over 40 years, Sigusch co-edited contributions to sexual research. He has written more than 800 scientific works, including 51 monographs. His works have been translated into many languages. Professor Sigusch died in February 2023. This interview originally appeared in Die Platypus Review.[4] It has been translated into English by Platypus members Johannes Hauber and Tamas Vilaghy.
Stefan Hain: Mr. Sigusch, 50 years after 1968, is the Left leading a struggle for sexual freedom today?
Volkmar Sigusch: Not that I know of.
SH: You studied under the supervision of Horkheimer and Adorno in the 60s. Since the 70s, you have repeatedly worked with former members of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund[5] (SDS) such as Reimut Reiche and Günter Amendt. What was your relationship to the “New Left”? Where did you see similarities in your positions and methods? Where were there differences?
VS: We had a number of differences. It was mainly because I grew up in the GDR and had formed a “resistance group” while I was a student in Berlin, where we secretly read banned writings in a cellar; for example, we read the early philosophical writings of Karl Marx which were banned in the GDR, and which I got from a book fair at the Freie Universität Berlin, a university in West Berlin. Banning writings by Karl Marx — I was beside myself with rage. Later, when I was a young professor in Frankfurt, I was giving lectures on a theory of sexuality from a biopsychosocial perspective — above all, critical of capitalism — when a former chairman of the SDS jumped up during the discussion and shouted, “Sigusch could have spoken Latin; I didn’t understand a word!” I replied: “From that you can discern how modest the theoretical level of the SDS is, since I was just referring to core statements by Karl Marx.”
SH: To dwell on this point: What role does Marxism play for a theory of sexuality?
VS: Marx was also once imbued with a hope for transition and revolution, just as Adorno was then imbued with a hope for resurrection, even though he perceived like no one else that the transcendental universality of reason was a reflected form of reification. Today, the process of reification can no longer be localized in any one area of society. Marx describes how relations between people are transferred into relations between things, so that dead things lead a life of their own, and individuals are no longer dependent on each other but on abstractions — but he does so essentially as a more œconomico,[6] within the framework of commodity and exchange relations, not in general. He could even imagine the self-dissolution of capital, so long as science and technology became a direct productive force. Here he saw his theory of value reaching the limits of its historical validity. This has not only occurred, but has been surpassed. “Capital” mocks all theories of its self-dissolution more realistically than ever before in its history.
It occurs to me that, among our predecessors, no thinker has been treated so shamefully as the exiled Jew Karl Marx. Nor has any such work of genius been so abused and distorted as that of Marx. As a child of the 19th century, Marx could not escape some blind spots of his time, for example when it came to romantically revolutionary ideas or uncritically patriarchal notions. Beyond such areas, he was no prophet, as his opponents claimed, but an incorrigible optimist, convinced that a free humanity would emerge from capitalism by virtue of natural necessity. The core theses of his analysis of capital, presented in brilliant logical and linguistic form, still apply today though, because capitalism has not changed its basic structure despite all of its upheavals. Today, capital is the golden calf around which people dance. It is the ineffable, the ungraspable of the present that has replaced taboo and God. Everything is offered, sold, rented, or valorized. Some sell security or virgins; others rent out genitals.
SH: In 1972, you founded the Institute for Sexual Science at the University of Frankfurt, which you headed until it was closed in 2006 — just in time for your retirement — despite huge protests. What was the initial reason for founding the Institute and what did you expect from such an institution?
VS: My concerns were of course not decisive for the founding of the Institute. The decision was made by social-democratic academics in Hesse, particularly Ludwig von Friedeburg, the Minister of Culture at the time, who of course came from the Institut für Sozialforschung.[7] I myself hoped to be able to change something in medicine. After all, I had already proven, in an empirical study with doctoral students, that the vast majority of doctors had no idea when it came to sexual and gender-related problems and illnesses. I had already incurred the wrath of the heads of the medical associations through what I published on the failures of doctors. They wanted to revoke my medical approbation, my license to practice as a physician. Of course, they also wanted to prevent my attempt to establish sexual medicine as a special area of study. In the end, the Library of Congress announced that I had published the world’s first book containing “Sexual Medicine” in its title, in whatever language.
SH: The Institute also represented an attempt, it seems to me, to anchor parts of the New Left’s critique in academia. The end of the Institute, on the other hand, raises the question if there was ever a chance for the “long march through the institutions.” What are the practical consequences for similar attempts today? Can there even be such attempts?
VS: It always has to be tried, although in my experience it is extremely difficult to do so in medicine, today as it was decades ago. In the social sciences, there was and still is a much better chance. When I got the medical professorship in Frankfurt, renowned Frankfurt sociologists such as Iring Fetscher, Alfred Lorenzer, and Ulrich Oevermann insisted that there was an extremely rare procedure for a second appointment, through which I also became Professor of Special Sociology (Sociology of Sexuality).
SH: What significance should the subject of sexuality have for Leftist politics today?
VS: A central one, because it is fundamentally about universal justice and individual self-confidence, if I only think of male violence and abusive sexism, and the general and legal disregard for gender and sexual deviations.
SH: In your book The Mystification of Sex, you describe the formative influence of the commodity form, as a central category of capitalism, on the sexuality of people and humanity. In doing so, you attach great importance to presenting this influence not only in its negative effects, but also in terms of its potential. What role does capitalism play for sexual freedom?
VS: Since capitalism does not care what social subjects do, as long as they don’t jeopardize its opportunities for profit, a number of liberalizations have been able to unfold in recent decades, which I have described under the term “Neosexual Revolution.”
SH: Yes, in recent decades, the general perception of sexuality has changed greatly. Homosexuality has been decriminalized and “marriage for all” has been officially introduced in Germany. Transsexuality is no longer primarily portrayed as “body horror” in popular discourse; instead, Caitlyn Jenner graces the cover of Vanity Fair as a trans woman.[8] Nevertheless, the question of whether sexuality is more open and free today than it was 50 years ago seems anything but straightforwardly decided. In recent years in particular, there have been calls for sexuality to be regulated; apps that document “mutual sexual consent” are just one example of this.
VS: This is something I cannot disagree with at all. The liberalizations which make up this “Neosexual Revolution” are not freedoms in the critical sense, but, as I said, liberalizations without a foundation. It is about a multitude of interlinked processes that produce neosexualities and neoalliances, primarily through dissociations of the sexual sphere, dispersions of sexual fragments, and diversifications of relationship forms, so that we now come across genders, preferences, and relationships such as agender, liquid gender, cissexuals, cougars, felching, dogging, silver sex, sapiosexuals, love scammers, etc., which I describe in my book The ABCs of Sex (2016)[9] and for which I sometimes had to invent terms — such as cissexual and cisgender — that have since been included in the Oxford English Dictionary.
SH: How should a Left in the 21st century address the contradictions of sexual freedom?
VS: Critically, but at the same time, in individual cases, calmly. The individual, whom I like to call, following Sartre, the “universel singulier”[10] — the individual universal — is simultaneously burdened and relieved, because the objectives which constitute both society and the consciousness of the individual universals force every individuality into an eccentric position. By an “objective” I mean a social arrangement in which material-discursive cultural techniques, symbols, life practices, economic and epistemological forms are networked in a way that gives rise to a historically novel construction of reality. The term is based on Foucault’s dispositif; behind Foucault’s theorem is, admittedly, his philosophy of power. As this breaks with the critique of political economy, I prefer to speak of “objectives” rather than “dispositives.” Since it is increasingly irrelevant for the course of society what the individual universal feels and thinks, sexual orientations, behaviors, and lifeworlds can pluralize, provided that discursive biases from past times or divergent objectives which cannot be understood solely in terms of value analysis — particularly in our context, the sexus potior[11]: sexism — do not stand in the way.
SH: Can there be a “humane sexuality” under capitalism?
VS: Yes, but only fragmentarily in individual cases. Because the wonderful thing is this: capitalism can neither produce nor sell love.
SH: What would have to change in order for a humane sexuality to emerge in general?
VS: The decisive factor would be the development of an ars erotica,[12] meaning a general culture of love and sexuality encompassing equality of all genders and people, i.e., a culture that we have not had thus far. In an inhuman and predatory social system such as capitalism, there can be no such erotic culture of love and sexuality. LĂ -bas.[13] |P
[1] Volkmar Sigusch, Ergebnisse zur Sexualmedizin: Arbeiten aus dem Institut für Sexualforschung an der Universität Hamburg (Cologne: Wissenschafts-Verlag, 1972).
[2] Volkmar Sigusch, Die Mystifikation des Sexuellen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1984).
[3] Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, vol. 3, Les Œuvres philosophiques: Dictionnaire, eds. André Jacob and Jean-François Mattéi (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992).
[4] Stefan Hain, “Keine Freiheiten im kritischen Sinne. Ein Interview mit Volkmar Sigusch über die Dämmerung der kritischen Sexualwissenschaft,” Die Platypus Review 11 (Winter 2019), <https://platypus1917.org/2019/01/12/keine-freiheiten-im-kritischen-sinne-interview-volkmar-sigusch-kritische-sexualwissenschaft/>.
[5] Socialist German Students’ League, founded in 1946 in Hamburg.
[6] [Latin] In the economic manner, the custom of the economy, etc.
[7] Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923 in Frankfurt am Main.
[8] Vanity Fair (July 2015).
[9] Volkmar Sigusch, Das Sex-ABC: Notizen eines Sexualforschers (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2016).
[10] See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface,” in L’Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 6.
[11] [Latin] The superior sex.
[12] [Latin] Erotic art, art of love, etc.
[13] [French] Over there, down there, i.e., not here.
