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. For anyone who reads SM history past Krafft-Ebing, this is the Hamburg study that treated living male sadomasochists as a population you could actually survey, instead of a catalogue of case horrors.
The 1974–75 survey versus Krafft-Ebing
Spengler’s M.D. at the Institute for Sexual Research, University Hospital Eppendorf, Hamburg, in 1976, laid down that first empirical survey. The important claim is methodological. He approached sadomasochism with modern sociological techniques and set the results against the assumptions and conclusions of the only previous study, the one by Krafft-Ebing. Years later the research was published in book form and, the record says, translated into several languages. The German volume is Sadomasochisten und ihre Subkulturen (Campus, Frankfurt am Main and New York, 1979, ISBN 3-593-32374-5). An English-language paper, “Manifest Sadomasochism of Males: Results of an Empirical Study,” appeared in Archives of Sexual Behavior 6 (1977): 441–456, and was reprinted in Weinberg and Kamel’s Studies on Sexual Dominance and Submission (Prometheus Books, Buffalo, 1983). That is the citation trail kink historians still use when they want numbers from the 1970s instead of another recitation of Psychopathia Sexualis. The fieldwork years are 1974 and 1975; the doctorate is 1976; the Archives paper is 1977; the Campus book is 1979. The subject is male sadomasochists and the subculture around them, surveyed rather than diagnosed from a court file.
Hamburg, Wunstorf, and a wider psychiatric career
In Hamburg he later worked on social-psychiatric reform projects 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 and of other professional societies. His later publications run across sexology, psychiatric emergencies, involuntary commitment, forensic psychiatry, and mental health service. He is a qualified medical specialist in psychiatry, psychotherapy, and forensic psychiatry. From 2008 to spring 2013 he chaired the Lower Saxony Committee on matters of mental health care. Beside the clinical work he has been involved with outsider art and history. The SM survey is the reason his name sits on this site. The rest of 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, emergency services, and commitment policy, not a weekend journalist slumming in a dungeon.
Papers, hospitals, and art after the SM study
The SM survey did not close the file on his writing. In 1978 he published “Transsexualität – eine Krankheit im Sinne der RVO” in Neue Juristische Wochenschrift 24: 1192–1193. His 1984 habilitation thesis at Universitätskrankenhaus Eppendorf, Hamburg, was Psychosexuelle Störungen nach Genitaloperationen. He wrote on the growth of Maßregelvollzug in Deutsches Ärzteblatt 101 (2004) — “Maßregelvollzug – ungebremster Zuwachs,” 8 October 2004, C 2208 / A 2730 — and on factors that influence assignment of patients to compulsory admission in Social Psychiatry 21 (1986): 113–122. He edited Institutsambulanzen in der psychiatrischen Versorgung (Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1991, ISBN 3-525-45738-3) and returned to psychiatric institute outpatient clinics in Nervenarzt 74 (2003): 476–478 and in Deutsches Ärzteblatt 109, no. 40 (2012): A 1981–1983, “Psychiatrische Institutsambulanzen. Leistungsfähig, bedarfsgerecht und innovativ.” “Zwangseinweisungen in Deutschland – Basisdaten und Trends” appeared in Psychiatrische Praxis 34 (2007): 191–195. A Wunstorf case piece, “Was geschehen ist – Das Beispiel Wunstorf,” sat in the 2005 German Protestant Kirchentag documents edited by Nagel, Quarch, Begerau, and von Fritsch. With S. Neuenhausen and L. Schlieckau he published Elementarkräfte – Schaffen und Werk psychiatrieerfahrener Künstler über 100 Jahre (Psychiatrie-Verlag, Bonn, 2010, ISBN 978-3-88414-599-9). With M. Koller and D. Hesse he issued Die Klingebiel-Zelle. Leben und künstlerisches Schaffen eines Psychiatriepatienten (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 2013, ISBN 978-3-525-30043-5). His own drawings and paintings were collected as pictor doctus – Fünf Jahrzehnte Zeichnung und Malerei (Wunstorf, 2017, ISBN 978-3-00-055610-4). The through-line for this site 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 at sadomasochists that answered Krafft-Ebing with a questionnaire instead of a diagnosis from the dock.
