Kurt Freund

Kurt Freund
Kurt Freund circa 1966.
Born	17 January 1914 Chrudim, Austrian Bohemia
Died	23 October 1996(1996-10-23) (aged 82) Toronto, Canada
Residence	Canada
Nationality	Czechoslovakian-Canadian
Fields	Sexologist
Institutions	Clarke Institute of Psychiatry
Alma mater	Charles University in Prague
Known for	Penile plethysmograph

Kurt Freund (17 January 1914 – 23 October 1996) was a Czech-Canadian physician and sexologist best known for developing phallometry (the objective measurement of sexual arousal in males), research studies in pedophilia, and for the "courtship disorder" hypothesis as a taxonomy of certain paraphilias (voyeurism, exhibitionism, toucherism, frotteurism, and what he called "preferential rape").

Freund was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Chrudim, then part of Austrian Bohemia, later Czechoslovakia, now in the Czech Republic. He married Anna Hlounová, a non-Jewish Czech pianist and music teacher, on 13 January 1942. In 1943, they divorced in order to protect Anna and their newborn daughter Helen from anti-Jewish and anti-miscegenation legislation implemented by the German Nazi Occupators. They remarried after the war in 1945, and Anna gave birth to a son, Peter, in 1948. Many of Freund's relatives died during the Holocaust, including his parents Heinrich and Hella, and his brother Hans.

Freund is best known for being the first to apply plethysmography (measurement of bloodflow) to the penis, thus permitting the first objective measurement of sexual arousal in males. Over his career, he refined the penile plethysmograph as part of a broad program of research on male sexual interest. The device remains controversial, and indeed Freund published articles acknowledging its limitations. Among other concerns, sexual offenders could sometimes suppress arousal through concentration or surreptitiously causing themselves pain, similar to methods for producing false results on a polygraph (lie detector). However, Freund still felt that the plethysmograph remained the best measure of arousal (there was no evidence that subjects could consistently fake arousal, though they could sometimes suppress it.) Other researchers and activists dispute PPG as the best measure of orientation, pointing out that neither identity nor behavior are perfectly correlated with measured or self-reported arousal. Freund acknowledged this, and in fact demonstrated it in his studies, but maintained that orientation per se was best defined as the object of arousal.