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I had already been trying for several years to find objective psychological diagnostic methods for various "neuroses", but had little success. The reason for this search was that I had realized the observational method used in psychoanalysis had turned out to be a failure, virtually unusable as an instrument for individual diagnosis or research. Because androphiles seemed to constitute a fairly homogeneous group of patients with a neurosis, I subsequently focused my search for objective diagnostic methods on the differentiation between gynephiles and androphiles. After having failed using the major "projective" and personality tests, and after a few primitive and equally unsuccessful attempts to devise similar procedures better suited for my purpose, I turned to having males view slides of nude females and males and I tried recording their breathing, heart rate, and finger plethysmography, while viewing these pictures. This too was unsuccessful, and led to the basic idea of penile plethysmography.

The existing mechanical plethysmographs used in Wundtian type psycho-physiological labs for assessing volume-changes in the limbs measured only relatively small changes. However, a physiologist colleague had recently published a similar device, for finger plethysmography that incidentally was also capable of measuring a much larger range of volume changes. This became our first phallometric device. A further seemingly insurmountable problem was getting the sensor air-tight. A preliminary publication of the method appears in the Czech psychiatric journal (Freund. 1957). The first English publication was in Review of Czechoslovac Medicine (Freund, Diamant, & Ptnkava, 1958).

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