Masochism

Current Psychoanalytic Perspectives

Robert A. Glick, Donald I. Meyers, Robert A. Glick, Donald I. Meyers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138146266
• eBook ISBN: 9781135061968
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Just as psychoanalytic interest in masochism dates from the earliest days of psychoanalysis, the various approaches to its understanding have reflected the developmental vicissitudes of psychoanalytic theory as it moved from its early focus on instinct to considerations of psychic structure and oedipall dynamics, object relations, separation-individuation, self-organization, and self-esteem regulation, and as it progressed into more systematic investigation of child development.

Masochism: Current Psychoanalytic Perspectives offers an updated review of perspectives on masochism influence by current developments in psychoanalytic research and theory. The newer emphasis on and investigations of early preoedipal events have, as Cooper stresses in this volume, provided a significant scientific and clinical yield. The application of these newer perspectives to the issue of masochism holds considerable promise.

1 / Introduction

Robert A. Glick
Donald I. Meyers

JUST AS PSYCHOANALYTIC INTEREST in masochism dates from the earliest days of psychoanalysis, the various approaches to its understanding have reflected the developmental vicissitudes of psychoanalytic theory as it moved from its early focus on instinct to considerations of psychic structure and oedipal dynamics, object relations, separation-individuation, self-organization, and self-esteem regulation, and as it progressed into more systematic investigation of child development.

This volume offers an updated review of perspectives on masochism influenced by current developments in psychoanalytic research and theory. The newer emphasis on and investigations of early preoedipal events have, as Cooper stresses in this volume, provided a significant scientific and clinical yield. The application of these newer perspectives to the issue of masochism holds considerable promise.

Theories of Masochism: A Review

Masochism may be succinctly described as "pleasure in pain" or "the pursuit of suffering," suffering being the willing submission to forms of enslavement, humiliation, cruelty, and physical and psychological abuse. Masochism, then, confronts psychoanalysis with a profoundly vexing theoretical and clinical challenge. As with other major issues in psychoanalysis, to examine the nature of masochism is to explore much of the structure of psychoanalytic thought and practice. The contributors to this volume examine current psychoanalytic understanding of this existentially perplexing phenomenon from a variety of perspectives.

This introductory chapter provides a review of some of, though certainly not all, the major contributions on this topic. A schema, or "guide of the terrain," useful in exploration, follows; but like all maps and guides, it is selective and therefore incomplete.

Psychoanalytic theory has developed several models of mind, within each of which are principal concerns. These models share certain premises but not others. The dynamic unconscious, psychic determinism, unconscious motivation—these are shared by all developmental, dynamic, adaptational frames of reference—these and others are shared by many; structure, wish, and defense by most; energy by few.

Pleasure and pain are defined or emphasized in different and important ways in the various mental models. Thought of instinctually and energically, masochism is a drive. It is an expression of sexual and aggressive instinctual drive derivatives that have been subjected to partial fusions, defusions, repressions, displacements, and phase or zonal regressions and fixations.

Structurally, masochism represents the appeasement of the superego for the gratification of forbidden, primarily oedipal wishes. The wish for punishment and the pleasurable wish are combined.

From an ego psychological view, masochism becomes the ego's defensive responses to a range of internal and external threats from different sources. Here the emphasis is on the ego's synthetic, compromising functions to avoid dangers and foster satisfactions.

Within object relations theory, masochism reflects the maintenance of crucial object relations. It is an attempt to protect self- and object representations from potentially dangerous drives or wishes, to stabilize and preserve intact complex, often painful internal object relations. Developmentally, masochism may evolve from the earliest, most primitive organization of bodily organismic sensations in the dawning of the differentiation and individuation of self from object, ego from id, and may become crucial in self-definition and self-lineation through the integration of pain. In terms of self development as a distinct developmental line and crucible of psychopathology, masochism may reflect aspects of the maintenance of self-cohesion, self-definition and control, or both; the dilemma of narcissistic vulnerability, grandiosity, and omnipotent wishfulness; and self-esteem regulation.

While masochism, both sexual and characterological, has most certainly existed for eons, psychoanalytic interest essentially started with the publication in 1870 of Venus in Furs by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch. It is from Von Sacher-Masoch that Krafft-Ebing (1906) was to coin the word "masochism" (as he also had done with sadism from the writings of the Marquis de Sade). Sacher-Masoch wrote several autobiographical novellas that attracted notoriety in late 19th century Germany and Austria. In Venus in Furs, his narrator begins in a dream conversation with the white marble goddess Venus, wrapped in dark sable furs. Venus taunts him with his passionate wish for enslavement and humiliation.

The narrator spends an evening with a friend, Severin, who fascinates him with a story of his own "Venus in Furs" and who explains the fundamental association of sadism and masochism. Among the many remarkable features of this work, Sacher-Masoch has not only detailed the story of overt sexual masochism but provided clues to many of the crucial concepts that would follow in the elucidation of masochism, (and are explored in this volume), namely, the role of the preoedipal mother and her phallic power, her devouring capacity "within her furs," the history of materal loss in the victim, the intimate relationship of sadism and masochism, bisexuality, constitutional instinctual aberration, the narcissism in masochism with its idealization and devaluation, the fear of object loss, the role of early trauma, the role of pain and skin eroticism, feminine identification in men, the establishment of masochistic contracts, the use of the cruel object for self-definition, and the positive and negative oedipal triangle.

Krafft-Ebing (1906), familiar with the novels of Sacher-Masoch, defined masochism as "the wish to suffer pain and be subjected to force, the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex; of being treated by this person, as by a master, humiliated and abused" (p. 131). Masochism was for Krafft-Ebing a sexual anomaly wherein the male was impotent except when he had an opportunity to experience suffering, subjugation, and abuse. It was a disorder of sexual instincts insufficiently checked by moral and aesthetic counter motives. It was congenital, not acquired, and led to a burdensome life of misery. In women, subjugation was a physiological phenomenon. Paralleling Freud, Krafft-Ebing equated passivity and submission with femininity, true to the culture of his time. He did report a few cases of masochistic perversions in women.

Krafft-Ebing saw the source of masochism as an intensification of normal dependence that progressed through the phenomenon of sexual bondage. (See chapter 3.) Characterological masochism in love relationships would then progress to masochistic perversions: "When the idea of being tyrannized is for a long time closely associated with a lustful thought of the beloved person, the lustful emotion is finally transferred to the tyranny itself, and the transformation to the perversion is completed" (p. 207). The capacity to develop a perversion, to establish that concrete enactment of a painful attachment, is hereditary, the result of so-called psychopathic constitution, "a tendency to sexually hyperaesthetic natures" (p. 208). This would fuse sexual ecstasy and subjugation. (See chapter 3 for a contemporary view of this phenomenon.)

Freud's Theories of Masochism

Freud's major writings on masochism began in 1905, with his "Three Essays on Sexuality," and culminated in 1924, with "The Economic Problem of Masochism." In "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" (1937), he referred to masochism as a powerful source of resistance.

Freud's achievement in the "Three Essays on Sexuality" was the postulation of sexual instinctual life in human beings. From his study of perversions and inversions (homosexuality), he concluded that mental life centered on drives and their regulation. These drives were the psychical representatives of biologically based bodily sexual needs, which developed in a phase-specific and zone-specific sequence in early life. Through the pursuit of satisfaction of these drives, the growing infant, and later the child, was forced to confront reality in the form of satisfiers and frustrators and to experience love and hate. Man, for Freud, became object related and social through instinctual needs and became civilized through the taming of these needs. Observations of masochistic and sadistic perversions in adults led Freud to the concept of masochistic and sadistic component instincts—component because they were partial, not complete, needs, that could act in concert with the sequence of oral, anal, phallic, and genital instinctual drives. Sadism and masochism were paired opposites; sadism, however, was primary, derived from biologically driven aggression and the instinct to survive, and roughly equated with activity and masculinity. Masochism arose through a change in the object of the drive from the external world to the subject, with sexual excitement associated with pain, suffering, submission, and humiliation. Central to his thinking throughout was Freud's observation that intense stimulation was associated with sexual excitement.

Pleasure in pain, the erotogenic effect of pain, in actual experience or in fantasy, was for Freud postulated as the physiological substrate for all later masochism. Perverse masochism in adults represented the pathological fixation or developmental arrest at this early stage, a drive that was not sufficiently repressed or modified by later genital sexual aims. Freud could not specify the causes for this fixation or failure of repression but suggested a complex compromise between constitutional and environmental influences.

Freud (1915) systematized instinct theory, stressing again that sadism was primary, based on the aggressive drive to master, and masochism represented redirecting the aggression onto the self and changing the mode from active to passive. He explained the satisfaction in masochism as vicarious. The masochist achieves gratification by identifying with the sadist in the act.

As his theoretical work advanced, Freud became increasingly convinced of the centrality of the Oedipus complex in mental life and the role of its resolution in the structuralization of the "mental apparatus" through the internalization of the ambivalently loved parents—the superego. The Oedipus complex was at the core of all neuroses, and guilt became man's primary burden in life.

In "A Child is Being Beaten" (1919), Freud again investigated the origins of sexual perversion. Here he stressed the role of unconscious guilt as the major motive for repression of oedipal wishes, leading to masochism. Offering a clinical study of six patients (four women and two men), mostly obsessionals and hysterics, Freud dissected the structure of the fantasy "a child is being beaten" to put forth what now would be more clearly an aspect of the defensive nature of masochism, not simply or exclusively its instinctual nature. Pain would become a condition for, not a simple cause of, sexual pleasure. This was a modification, though not a replacement, of his earlier and persistent view of the physiological substrate of pleasure in pain. People with beating fantasies as features of their adult sexual lives— and there were many, according to Freud—had become derailed or fixated along the path of infantile sexual development, probably because of constitutional predisposition. This sadistic component instinct, prematurely independent, broke loose from the normal modulating and "metabolizing" effect of sexual development and underwent fixation. Burdened by an excess of aggression, these people established complexly layered beating fantasies in childhood, around the age of five or six. In women, the first phase of this fantasy, not masochistic, was of a rival being beaten by the father. The meaning of this part of the fantasy was that "father only loves me," and the rivalrous aggression was usually directed against a boy child. The second masochistic phase remained unconscious and was reconstructed in analysis. In this phase, the fantasy was "I am being beaten by father on the buttocks." The third phase, which was associated with sexual excitement and masturbation, was the part reported by patients in the clinical setting, that is, "a child is being beaten." In this fantasy, repression forced substitution of another authority for the father and other children for the self. This final fantasy, then, represented a regressive substitute satisfaction for incestuous wishes, which converged with an unconscious sense of guilt; this conflict was repressed, and regression to the anal-sadistic phase allowed the compromise resolution. Freud described only two phases in men: first the unconscious, homosexual wish to submit to being beaten by father; and, second, submission to a beating by a powerful woman who replaces father. In line with Freud's adherence to the oedipal source of all neuroses, it was the father who was the love object for both men and women in their beating fantasies, being a source of both sexual satisfaction and punishment.

Summing up, Freud states:

Masochism is not the manifestation of the primary instinct, but originates from sadism which has been turned around upon the self, that is to say, by means of regression from an object into the ego. Instincts with a passive aim must be taken for granted as existing, especially among women. The passivity is not the whole of masochism. The characteristic of unpleasure belongs to it as well—a bewildering accompaniment to the satisfaction of an instinct. The transformation of sadism into masochism appears to be due to the influence of the sense of guilt which takes part in the act of repression. Thus repression is operative here in 3 ways. It renders the consequences of the genital organization unconscious, it compels that organization itself to regress to the early sadistic anal stage, and transforms the sadism of the stage to masochism, which is passive and again in a certain sense, narcissistic [p. 193-194],

This formulation of masochism reflects the evolving importance of the superego, which provokes a sense of guilt for sexual and aggressive drives. Freud was at this point in his mental model-building, advancing toward the tripartite hypothesis where the superego became both the major instigator of repression and the heir and product of the resolution of the oedipal phase.

"The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924) was Freud's last major contribution on masochism, written after "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1923) and "The Ego and The Id" (1923). In a remarkably concise fashion, so characteristic of some of Freud's short, gemlike papers, he clarified and modified the pleasure principle, the constancy or Nirvana principle, and the reality principle to accommodate his revised dual instinct theory. Pleasure was no longer equated with quantitative reduction of stimulus-induced tension. Tension reduction was now the expression of the "death instinct." Pleasure now arose from qualitative changes in the rhythm and sequences of the expression of libidinal drives.

Elaborating the complex energies of this dual instinct theory, Freud reversed his prior position on the primacy of sadism in masochism, postulating instead the existence of the components of the death instinct that are fused with libido and self-directed. This primary masochism accounted for the physiological substrate of pleasure in pain. The association of sexual excitement with increases in psychic tension Freud called erotogenic masochism. That part of the death instinct directed outward in the world as the instinct to master, or sadism, could then secondarily be redirected against the self in later life as secondary masochism. Through these processes of fusion, defusion, and refusion of sexual and death instincts, the pleasure principle could be preserved as the regulatory principle in masochism.

Turning his attention to the clinical manifestations of masochism, which could now be explained by his instinct theory, Freud again grounded the vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex and the consequent structure of the mental apparatus firmly in the instincts. This allowed him to integrate the beating fantasy in both perverse masochism in males, so-called feminine masochism, and characterologic masochism, so-called moral masochism, or the unconscious need for punishment. The unconscious beating fantasy, forged both as satisfaction and defense, was the basis of all later masochism. In feminine masochism, men inhibited in normal sexual arousal and release could regress to the expression of the unconscious wish for the father through the fantasy of being a small, helpless, naughty female child; thus pain, humiliation, and subjugation through identification with the female and the wish to have the father would allow sexual satisfaction.

In moral masochism, noted particularly in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• 1/ Introduction
• 2/ The Concept of Character: A Historical Review
• 3/ Sadomasochistic Excitement: Character Disorder and Perversion
• 4/ Clinical Dimensions of Masochism
• 5/ Those Wrecked by Success
• 6/ The Analytic Concepts of Masochism: A Reevaluation
• 7/ The Narcissistic-Masochistic Character
• 8/ Masochism and the Repetition Compulsion
• 9/ On Masochism: A Theoretical and Clinical Approach
• 10/ A Consideration of Treatment Techniques in Relation to the Functions of Masochism
• 11/ The Precursors of Masochism: Protomasochism
• 12/ Adolescent Masochism
• Author Index
• Subject Index