Andreas Spengler (born 10 June 1947 in Goslar) is the German psychiatrist who, in 1974 and 1975, ran a sociological study of sadomasochism in men at the Institute for Sexual Research in the University Hospital Eppendorf (UKE) in Hamburg. The work became his 1976 M.D. and the first international empirical survey of sadomasochists and their subculture. Later it appeared as a book and was translated into several languages. Where earlier writers such as Krafft-Ebing treated sadomasochists mainly as clinical cases, Spengler approached living, socialized male sadomasochists as a population you could actually survey.
He used modern sociological techniques, including questionnaires, and set the results against Krafft-Ebing’s assumptions and conclusions. An English-language paper, “Manifest Sadomasochism of Males: Results of an Empirical Study,” appeared in Archives of Sexual Behavior 6 (1977): 441–456. The German volume Sadomasochisten und ihre Subkulturen was published by Campus (Frankfurt am Main and New York) in 1979 and translated into several languages. Kink historians still use that citation trail when they want 1970s numbers instead of another recitation of Psychopathia Sexualis.
In Hamburg he later worked on social-psychiatric reform and on building a psychiatric emergency service. From 1988 to 2008 he was medical director at the Lower Saxony State Hospital Wunstorf, now Klinikum Region Hannover Wunstorf. He is a full member of the International Academy of Sex Research, a specialist in psychiatry, psychotherapy, and forensic psychiatry, and from 2008 to spring 2013 he chaired the Lower Saxony Committee on matters of mental health care. He has also been involved with outsider art and history; his drawings and paintings were collected as pictor doctus. The résumé is why the survey was taken seriously: it came out of a working sex-research institute and a psychiatrist who then spent decades running hospitals and commitment policy, not a weekend journalist in a dungeon.
Writing continued after the SM study. In 1978 he published on transsexuality and the RVO in Neue Juristische Wochenschrift. His 1984 habilitation at UKE Hamburg was Psychosexuelle Störungen nach Genitaloperationen. He wrote on Maßregelvollzug growth, factors in compulsory admission, and psychiatric institute outpatient clinics, edited Institutsambulanzen in der psychiatrischen Versorgung, and co-authored Elementarkräfte and Die Klingebiel-Zelle. For this site the through-line is still the Hamburg male-SM survey: 1974–75 in the field, 1976 as a doctorate, 1977 in the Archives, 1979 as the Campus book — the first empirical look that answered Krafft-Ebing with a questionnaire instead of a diagnosis from the dock.
