[7] In an article of 1894, Dessoir published an account of the evolution of the sex instinct from undifferentiated to differentiated, which was taken up by Albert Moll and Sigmund Freud.

[9] Considered a Neo-Kantian philosopher Max Dessoir founded the Zeitschift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, which he edited for many years, and published the work Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in which he formulated five primary aesthetic forms: the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the ugly, and the comic.

The word is not nice, yet in my opinion it has the advantage to denote a hitherto unknown fringe area between the average and the pathological states; however, more than the limited value of practical usefulness such neologisms do not demand.

He was the author of the book Vom Jenseits der Seele: Die Geheimwissenschaften in kritischer Betrachtung (The "beyond" of the soul: occult sciences critically examined) that went through six editions.

He published a series of articles entitled The Psychology of Legerdemain, which were printed in five weekly installments for the Open Court journal from 23 March – 20 April 1893.