Masochism

   See also Sadism.

   In our own time, "masochism" has taken on three meanings: (1) the voluntary acceptance of suffering; (2) in psychoanalysis, an intrapsychic mechanism for dealing with anxiety; (3) a kind of sex play among consenting adults now increasingly called "role-playing," but also referrred to as "SM" (for sadomasochism), or "BDSM" (for "bondage and domination, sadism and masochism"). The term enters psychiatry, actually, in the third sense. Although an interest in flogging and being flogged goes back for centuries—a "friend" of the fifteenth-century Italian scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) being an example (as Pico recounts in his Disputationes [1495])—the taste for flogging acquired a name only after Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing read Venus in Fur (Venus im Pelz), the 1869 novella of Austrian nobleman Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895) about a protagonist remarkably similar to himself who loves being flogged and humiliated by arrogant women dressed in fur. In the first edition of his 1890 book, New Research in the Area of Psychopathia Sexualis (Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der Psychopathia sexualis), Krafft introduced the term "masochism" and popularized the term "sadism." The following year, in the sixth edition in 1891 of his big sex-pathology book, Psychopathia sexualis, he expanded the discussion, giving examples of women fantasizing about being slaves of their lovers, and also of men submitting to the control of what Krafft was calling a "domina," a woman who towered over the male sexually.

   Freud borrowed Krafft’s term in his own exploration of psychodynamics, but attached to it a quite different meaning. Because "masochism" was already well established, it is no surprise that Freud uses it early in his writing, noting in 1900 in the Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung), "In the sexual constitution of so many people there is a masochistic component, which arises as a result of turning into the opposite of the aggressive, sadistic component" (Gesammelte Werke, II, p. 165). Yet in his 1920 book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle ( Jenseits des Lustprinzips), Freud used masochism in a rather different sense: "primary" masochism as the version of the death instinct that is inwardly directed toward one’s self.

   In 1932, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich proposed in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse) the existence of the "masochistic character," a concept he had come up with as a way of breaking with Freud’s theory of the death instinct (which implied that we suffer because of a biological will to do so, or "death instinct"). The paper was incorporated into his book Character Analysis the following year. Reich challenged Freud’s theory that "unpleasure was pleasure." "Rather," said Reich, "the masochist’s specific mechanism of pleasure consisted precisely in that, while he strives after pleasure like any other person, a disturbing mechanism causes this striving to miscarry. This, in turn, causes the masochist to perceive sensations, which are experienced as pleasurable by the normal person, as unpleasurable when they exceed a certain intensity. The masochist, far from striving after unpleasure, demonstrates a strong intolerance of psychic tensions and suffers from a quantitative overproduction of unpleasure, not to be found in any other neurosis" (p. 236 of the English translation, 3rd ed.). (See Personality Disorders: Reich’s analysis of "character armor" [1933].)

   After Freud and Reich, interest within psychoanalysis shifted from masochism as a form of death instinct to "moral masochism," which psychoanalyst Theodor Reik (1888–1969) in his 1941 book, Masochism in Modern Man, said represented a character type. It was not that the masochist had reversed "pleasure values" and derived pleasure from pain. In a chapter called "Victory Through Defeat," Reik observed that, "The masochist aims at the same pleasure we all do, but he arrives at it by another road, by a detour. Intimidated by threatening anxiety, inhibited by the idea of punishment and later by unconscious guilt-feeling, he found his particular way of avoiding anxiety and gaining pleasure. He submits voluntarily to punishment, suffering, and humiliations, and thus has defiantly purchased the right to enjoy the gratification denied before" (p. 428). Thus, as masochism entered postwar American psychiatry, it was simultaneously a kind of character disorder and a form of sexual behavior.

   DSM-I (1952) passed in silence over masochism, but DSM-II in 1968, heavily in-fluenced by psychoanalysis, listed it among the "sexual deviations" without further specification. DSM-III in 1980 defined masochism as "sexual excitement produced in an individual by his or her own suffering." This placed the emphasis on the production of actual pain rather than the psychodrama of role-playing, and the Manual dwelt upon lives being "threatened." DSM-III-R had the most elaborate discussion of masochism in the series, distinguishing between "urges" that involve "being humiliated, beaten, bound, or otherwise made to suffer," and "masochistic personality disorder," a condition tentatively listed in the Appendix of DSM-III-R and also called "self-defeating personality disorder" in the hopes of not upsetting feminists who asserted that the masochism diagnosis implied that women enjoyed suffering. Masochism disappeared entirely from DSM-IV in 1994.

   The entirely nonpsychiatric notion of masochism as pleasureable role-playing, an activity initially psychiatrized by Krafft-Ebing, seems to have surfaced in the 1930s, with the leather-clad figure of the dominatrix whose gear asserts her authority, and has steadily increased in visibility since then. (See Sadism on sadomasochism.)