Friedrich Salomon Krauss

Who was Friedrich Salomon Krauss?

Friedrich Salomon Krauss was an Croatian Austrian Jewish sexologist, ethnographer, folklorist, and Slavist.

In 1877–78 Krauss attended the University of Vienna. One of his first publications was a translation of Artemidoros' of Daldis "Interpretation of Dreams" was cited in Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams." He began his career as a folklorist and ethnologist. In 1884–85, he received funding from the Crown Prince Rudolf to gather folklore and ballads of the Guslar singers in Bosnia, Croatia and Herzogovenia. As a result of this field research, he published a two-volume collection of fairytales, Sagen und Märchen der Südslaven. Perhaps his most famous work was the Anthropophytia, a scholarly yearbook which published folklore of erotic and sexual content. In alliance with the growing psychoanalytic movement, Krauss and his colleagues felt that sexual folklore, which was generally purged from all published collections by scholars, could provide valuable information about a culture and society. His research in the field of sexuality led to some conflict and in 1913 he was brought to trial in Berlin as a pornographer, but he was a correspondent of Sigmund Freud and used the term paraphilia to describe certain deviant sexual practices. He lived and worked as a writer, private scholar, and translator in Vienna.