Masochism: A Jungian Approach

Introduction

There is something rather enigmatic about masochism, that paradoxical combination of pleasure
and pain, eros and suffering. Somehow, it would seem that there is something in its very nature
that eludes all attempts to limit its scope, to pin it down, to be able, once and for all, to give a
clear definition what is and what is its significance for the psyche. As the psychoanalyst Arthur
Valenstein once complained, masochism tends to easily become ‘obscured in a sea of words’.
(1981,p. 674) We can see this with Freud himself, who never ceased to struggle with his attempts
to provide a satisfactory scientific definition of masochism. Even he was forced despite himself
to extend the concept beyond actual sexual behaviour and the field of the perversions to include
the categories of moral masochism and feminine masochism. If masochism was originally
presumed to be secondary to sadism it gradually became conceived of as a primary force of the
psyche and in the end Freud had to invent the death instinct, that most uncanny of all Freudian
concepts, to explain it.
The birth of psychoanalysis and the transformation of masochism into a category of the new
science of sexual psychopathology are, as the psychoanalyst William Grossman points out, more
or less contemporaneous(1986,p. 379) . Like psychoanalysis and analytical psychology,
masochism is a product of modernity and as such it is must be seen as the expression of the status
of soul in our modern world. As James Hillman noted, through the efforts of Kraft-Ebbing and
Freud, ‘those crucial experiences of psychic life, eros and suffering and their union, had become
through the simple materialism of the nineteenth century nothing but pleasure and pain……and
the small measure to which these themes has shrunk was yet further reduced: pleasure was sexual
pleasure and pain was physical pain.’ (1978,p. 143) Masochism however is not just a
phenomenon of modernity. As Lyn Cowan writes, ‘ For centuries, the experience of simultaneous
suffering and pleasure was understood through contexts other than the particular field which
came to be known as psychology – contexts such as myth, alchemy, romantic love and religion’.
(1982, p.12)

To understand masochism therefore we need to be able to take into consideration not just its
scientific dimensions but equally its religious, and cultural meanings. What is essential is to
remember however, is that, in the last analysis, the most important thing in understanding the

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function and purpose of masochism is not behaviour but fantasy. As Cowan puts it, masochism is
‘a paradoxical, emotionally-laden, scientifically named, historically conditioned psychic
fantasy’(idem, p.6 ), a more nuanced definition that I feel comes closer to the complexity of this
phenomena. It is only when we look at fantasy that it becomes possible to be able to trace out the
differences in the structure, function and metaphorical quality of erotic masochistic fantasies and
perverse masochistic fantasies, fundamental if we are to understand the significance of
masochism for modernity.

Masochism: The Scientific Dimension

The first definition of masochism as a scientific entity springs from Richard von Kraft-Ebbing
in his work of 1876. For Kraft-Ebbing masochism is:

a peculiar perversion of the psychical sexual life in which the individual affected, in sexual feeling and
thought, is controlled by 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 a master, humiliated and abused. This idea is
coloured by lustful feelings; the masochist lives in fantasies in which he creates situations of this kind and
often attempts to realize them. By this perversion his sexual instinct is often made more or less insensible
to the normal charms of the opposite sex – incapable of a normal sexual life – psychically impotent.
(1965,p.86)

For Kraft Ebbing therefore, the essential factor in masochism is ‘sexual bondage’, the total
submission or surrender to an idealized love object.
For Freud on the other hand, with his biological model of the psyche, as we have seen, erotogenic
pain becomes the essential factor and masochism is defined essentially as pleasure in pain, or
more fully, ‘the seeking of unpleasure, by which is meant physical or mental pain, discomfort or
wretchedness, for the sake of sexual pleasure, with the qualification that either the seeking or the
pleasure or both may be unconscious rather that conscious’ according to the classical definition
provided by Brenner (1959,p.197) If for Freud masochism is always linked to biology through
the sexual instinct , gradually the term has been extended to cover a much wider range of psychic
disorders. As Maleson writes:

The term masochism was originally used in a narrow specifically sexual sense (referring to perversions)
but has come to encompass for many analysts an exceedingly broad and variably determined range of

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clinical phenomena that bear no consistent relationship to sexual excitement… as a result, the term is used
with little consistency and at various levels of abstraction. (1984,pp. 353-4)

According to Maleson the gradual emphasis on the role of non-sexual factors in masochistic
phenomena has lead to the use of a much broader definition of masochism in which the term is
used in a purely descriptive manner to refer to behaviour, thoughts, fantasies, symptoms or
syndromes characterized by subjectively experienced pain or suffering which seems unnecessary,
excessive or in some way self-induced and therefore included both normal and pathological
phenomena. In this sense masochism is seen as an almost ubiquitous part of psychological life.
Otto Kernberg for example gives a general classification of masochistic psychopathology based
on clinical factors such as ‘the vicissitudes of libidinal and aggressive strivings, superego
development and pathology, levels of ego organization and pathology of internalized object
relations and the extent to which normal or pathological narcissistic functions predominate.
(1988,p.61) This classification extends all the way from ‘normal’ masochism to masochistic
character pathology which includes, depressive-masochistic personality disorder,
sadomasochistic personality disorder, primitive self-destructiveness and self-mutilation up to
masochistic perversions proper which include sexual masochism at a neurotic level of personality
organization, sexual masochism with self-destructive features and at the most severe end of the
spectrum. forms of self-mutilation linked to malignant narcissism or psychosis.

In order to understand why the attempt to limit the scientific definition of masochism has
essentially failed to the point that it has become an almost ubiquitous phenomena and thus
relatively useless from a scientific point of view it is necessary to make an historical digression to
trace the origins of the two major errors Freud made in his study of sexuality and perversion: his
use of sexual behaviours and his use of biological and evolutionary criteria for distinguishing
between normal and abnormal sexual behaviours. Like the sexual psychopathologists who
preceded him, Freud dreamed of bringing scientific rigor and objectivity to the study of human
sexuality and like them, he preferred to concentrate his initial attention on behaviour rather than
on the inner erotic experience for, as Georges Bataille has pointed out, eroticism is an experience
that cannot be assessed from outside in the way an object can. (p.149) Only when sexuality is
reduced to something quantifiable and objective such as behaviour can it be studied according to
the paradigms of 19th century science. And of course, at the beginning it seemed as though
Freud’s strategy had paid off. Once psychoanalysis concentrated its attention on behaviour it
could begin to delineate a science of sexuality, with its own definitions of normal sexual

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behaviour, its own categories of abnormal behaviours and its own hypotheses about the causes
and structures of each separate category of abnormal behaviour.

This science of sexual psychopathology has not stood up to the test of time however and over the
years Freud’s carefully constructed edifice has began to crumble and some analysts began to
express their dissatisfaction with Freud’s very normative and quantitative approach to
perversion . According to Freud’s criteria for perversion, a large part of adult human sexuality
and all of infantile sexuality could be defined as perverse and adult perversion occurred when a
part of infantile sexuality overcame repression and was admitted into consciousness. Donald
Meltzer for example criticized Freud’s biological and normative approach to sexuality and his
lack of interest in what Meltzer calls ‘sexual states of mind’ prevented him from distinguishing
between adult sexuality which is richly polymorphous, infantile sexuality which is polymorphous
and perverse and perverse sexuality proper. This is in part in line with Jung who saw no
continuity between adult perversion and infantile sexuality.

If the goal of masochism is not simply the search for sexual pleasure through pain, what then is
its function. One of the first to emphasize a broader definition was Karen Horney who linked
masochism to the desire for self-oblivion and hypothesized that:

All masochistic strivings are ultimately directed towards satisfaction, namely towards the goal of oblivion,
of getting rid of self with all its conflicts and its limitations. The masochistic phenomena which we find in
neuroses would then represent a pathological modification of the Dionysian tendencies which seem to be
spread throughout the world. (1966,p.248)

Similarly, Jessica Benjamin goes back to Kraft-Ebbing and stresses that the crucial factor in
masochism is submission and she criticizes Freud’s emphasis on pain, stressing that in
masochism, the pain is simply a metaphoric or symbolic expression of submission: As she puts
it, ‘The symbolic significance of pain is violation, a rupture of ego boundaries; its aim is the loss
of self through submission to an idealized other’. ( 1983, p.280)
The scientific approach while partially valid tends to forget that well before it was a scientific
problem, masochism was linked both to religious experience and to aesthetics and culture and we
need to be able to take all these different dimensions into consideration if we are to understand
the psychological functions of masochism and the different functions of perverse and erotic
masochism. As Lyn Cowan writes, ‘science is not the only model of investigation (of masochism)
and not even the best….because it appears in a multiplicity of images a multiplicity of meaning is
attached and we require a multiplicity of approaches to understand it. (1982,p. 6)

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Masochism: The Religious Dimension

As Hillman pointed out, the union of eros and suffering is a widely known religious phenomenon,
especially among Christians whose martyrs used a mystical speech drawn from the Song of
Songs and the Passion to describe their fearful joys’. (1972, p. 143) The emphasis on submission
to an idealized other noted by Horney and Benjamin, is similar to the approach of Rosemary
Gordon who hypothesizes that ‘masochism, that impulse to want to expose oneself to pain and to
suffering, is the inferior, the shadow-side of the need to worship and venerate.’ (1987,p.228)
For Lyn Cowan too, masochism can be seen as a particular manifestation of the religious instinct
and she suggests that it is possible to discern the outlines of some fundamental Christian concepts
behind masochistic phenomena As she puts it:

Suffering, repentance, atonement, and sacrifice, whether or not they are cast in a specifically Christian
framework are fundamental psychological experiences. They may be humiliating to the ego but they are of
profound import and meaning - and sometimes intense pleasure – to the soul. These experiences may
bring humility and healing. (p.26-27)

Naturally however as Jung himself was very clear there is a profound difference between
suffering in the service of a religious goal and suffering as a punishment and a way of expiating
guilt ( moral masochism). As he writes referring to the pain and suffering involved in initiation
ceremonies, ‘ For the neophyte it would be a real sin if he shrank from the torture of initiation.
The torture inflicted on him is not a punishment but the indispensible means of leading him
towards his destiny’. (1954,§410)
Self-inflicted pain, suffering and mortification of the body have since the very beginnings of
culture, always played a fundamental role in religions and initiation rituals but here suffering in
itself is neither the aim nor the source of pleasure but merely the means of achieving
transformation, religious ecstasy and the mystical union with the transcendental ground of being.
For Rosemary Gordon, ‘in the case of punishment, initiation and sacrifice, pain is not self-
chosen, nor is it the primary objective, as it is in the case of masochism. Rather it is an imposed
or inescapable part of the larger task or goal’. (1987,p. 229)

Masochism: The Cultural Dimension

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Masochism has also an aesthetic and cultural dimension. We noted earlier that masochism as a
particular category of human behaviour took form around the beginning of modernity. If one of
the fundamental factors in the religious impulse is to give meaning to human suffering, the
gradual erosion of religious beliefs in the West has lead over time to profound alterations in the
significance of pain and suffering. According to Masud Khan, ‘ with the increasing
disappearance of God as a witnessing other from man’s privacy within himself, the experience of
psychic pain has changed from tolerated and accepting suffering to its pathological substitutes’.
( 1979, p.211) If the power of religion to give meaning to human suffering and pain became
gradually eroded, its place was usurped by a kind of erotic aesthetics which Mario Praz
termed‘erotic sensibility’.
We can see this transformation in the significance and function of psychic pain in the profound
changes in literary tradition and in the rise of Romanticism which took place in the 19th century.
Romanticism, as Mario Praz has pointed out in ‘The Romantic Agony’ is characterized by ‘the
mysterious bond between erotic pleasure and suffering’. ( 1970, p.xxi) In the work of artists such
as Keats, Gautier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Swinbourne, Wilde and Pater, Praz, following Benedetto
Croce, traces out a gradual loss of the ethical values and ideals that were characteristic of the
earlier Romantics and the gradual rise of an aesthetic conception of life, ‘Art for Art’s sake’. This
loss of ethical ideals according to Praz had two important effects: on the one hand the destruction
of ‘ such barriers as dammed up the morbid tendencies of Romantic sensibility’; on the other a
gradual shift in gender roles and a movement away from what Praz terms the Fatal Man (the
Byronic or Sadean hero) to the Fatal Woman( Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci or Swinburne’s
Dolores, Our Lady of Pain) . This movement cannot however be simply dismissed as a question
of individual pathology but it has important cultural implications. As Praz puts it, ‘It is not
simply a case of convention and literary fashion: literature even in its most artificial forms
reflects to some extent aspects of contemporary life. It is curious to follow the parabola of the
sexes during the 19th century: the obsession for the androgyne type towards the end of the century
is a clear indication of a turbid confusion of function and ideal. The male who at first tends
towards sadism, inclines at the end of the century towards masochism.’. (p.216) The classical
example of this kind of literature is of course ‘Venus in Furs’ ( Venus im Peltz) of Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch, first published in 1870. Anticipating Freud, Sacher-Masoch as Giles Deleuze
notes, defines for the first time masochism as a clinical entity ‘ not merely in terms of the link
between pain and sexual pleasure, but in terms of something more fundamental connected with
bondage and humiliation.’ ( p. 16) Even more importantly however, Masoch aims at redefining
gender roles and at the birth of a new image of masculinity and femininity. Masoch’s ideal

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woman is a fusion between the hetaeric or Aphroditic matriarchal woman described by Bachofen
and what Deleuze calls the oedipal mother, victim or accomplice of the sadistic father who
incarnates the patriarchal symbolic order and the law. This ‘new woman’ represents woman as
Nature, the source of life and death, cold- maternal-severe, icy-sentimental-cruel. ( p. 51) At the
heart of the masochistic fantasy according to Deleuze is the idea of rebirth of the new man
through the abolishment of the paternal law and the establishment of maternal symbolic order:
Femininity is posited as lacking nothing and placed alongside a virility suspended in disavowal
( just as the absence of a penis need not indicate lack of the phallus, its presence likewise need
not indicate possession of the phallus). Hence in masochism the girl has no difficulty in assuming
the role of the son in relation to the beating mother who possesses the ideal phallus and on whom
rebirth depends. ( p.68)

The masochistic turn in literature has not just cultural implications but equally aesthetic ones.
For Gilles Deleuze, Sade and Masoch are not only patients or clinicians; they are above all ‘ great
anthropologists of the type whose work succeeds in embracing a whole conception of man,
culture and nature; they are also great artists in that they discovered new forms of expression,
new ways of thinking and feeling and an entirely original language. (1991.p. 16) For Deleuze,
rather than speaking of a specifically masochistic fantasy we need to think rather of ‘a
masochistic art of fantasy’. For these artists, erotic masochistic fantasies became a means of
expressing soul and achieving individual and cultural transformation. As Cowan puts it:

To see soul in sex, to see sex as a fantasy of soul, detracts nothing from its animality and the confusions of
shame lowness and inferiority. Fantasy helps preserve the animal in us …and inhibits that peculiar human
pride that has elevated mind over matter, spirit over body, and left us with soul cast adrift, a poignantly
lonely species. (p.58)

Lyn Cowan argues that masochism is, ‘a natural product of soul, ready and needing to bring
forward its own vision and its own cure’,(1982,p.33), a path, no matter how bizarre and shocking,
towards individuation? This is in line with the ideas of Guggenbuhl-Craig who sees masochism
as a particular mode of individuation, of that psychic process that forces us to enter into contact
with all the parts of the microcosm of our psyche. He points out that the compulsive and coercive
nature of perverse fantasies and practices have a symbolical connection with the inevitable
necessity of individuation. As he writes:

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The opposites –suffering and joy, pain and pleasure – are symbolically united in masochism. Thus life can
be actually accepted and even pain can be joyfully experienced. The masochist in a remarkable and
fantastic way confronts and comes to terms with the greatest oppositions of our existence. (1977, p.86-7)

Erotic masochistic fantasies thus do indeed have an important role to play in furthering
individuation but as I hope to show, the same is certainly not true of perverse fantasies which act
only in the service of ego and are incapable of producing any real transformation.

Masochism and Fantasy

I want here to return to Cowan’s definition of masochism as ‘a paradoxical, emotionally-laden,

scientifically named, historically conditioned psychic fantasy’. In the last analysis I am convinced
that the most important thing in understanding the function and purpose of masochism is not
behaviour but fantasy.
What I now wish to examine are the differences between erotic masochistic fantasies and
perverse masochistic fantasies as I believe that although the content of these two types of
fantasies are usually very similar, they have very different structures and functions and a very
different aesthetic quality.

Erotic Fantasies

According to Georges Bataille in Eroticism eroticism, ‘unlike simple sexual activity is a

psychological quest independent of the natural goal: reproduction and the desire for children’. ( p.
11) Eroticism for Bataille is assenting to life up to the point of death and its fundamental aim is
‘to substitute for the individual isolated discontinuity a feeling of profound continuity’. (p. 15)
He draws a parallel between the transcendence of limits in religious sacrifice and in erotic
intercourse. Just as the violent death of the sacrifice disrupts the creature’s discontinuity and
returns it to the continuity of being, so the lover strips the beloved of her identity thus breaking
down the barrier that once separated her from others and made her impenetrable. It is this desire
to transcend mundane reality and to dissolve the boundaries of the ego in order to achieve union
with something beyond and above the individual self, that Bataille asserts is the common factor in
religious, aesthetic and erotic experiences. As he writes:

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Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism – to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It
leads us to eternity, it leads us to death and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched
with the sea.’ (p.25)

In individuals who seek transcendence and the way to individuation through erotic masochism
there is, as Rosemary Gordon states, ‘ a desire to reach through love, surrender and submission
something or somebody beyond themselves, idealized maybe, but nevertheless experienced as
beyond and superior to themselves.’ (p.238) In perverse masochism however the desire is very
different.

The Structure of Perverse Fantasies

Perverse fantasies, from a structural point of view can be differentiated from erotic fantasies in
three principle ways: their rigidity and its impermeability to change; the drive towards
actualization; their illusionary character. The French psychoanalyst, Christian David was one of
the first to draw attention to the particular rigidity of perverse fantasy and Joyce McDougall too
notes the incapacity of perverse individuals to daydream freely around sexual themes and she
distinguishes between fantasies that might appear perverse but are actually part of a normal
sexual relationship and fantasies that have a quality of rigidity and a demand for narrow
compliance. For McDougall the perverse psychic structure leads to a singularly impoverished
fantasy life that has little erotic freedom and is ‘fundamentally compulsive’. ( 1972,p.371)
According to Fiona Ross, in ‘Perversion: A Jungian Approach’, in perversion, ‘the myth making
capacity is severely curtailed through the disabling of the transcendent function and the lack of
intrapsychic connectivity. This leaves the psyche dominated by an impoverished and simplistic
fantasy based on early trauma, a deceptive narrative through which all relational encounters are
translated.’ (2013,p. 72) It is the illusionary and deceptive nature of the perverse fantasy that
leads to the drive towards actualization. The need to act out the fantasy seems to be related to the
quality of the fantasy: the more impoverished the fantasy the more the individual needs to act it
out in order to give it life. Nacht, Diatkine and Favreau, suggest that the relationship between
fantasy and the act is complex. In less severe cases of sado-masochistic perversion, the pleasure

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obtained from the fantasy is at least as intense as its acting-out and even in severe cases of sexual
sadism, the fantasy leads to acting-out, only in particular circumstances.
Michel De M’Uzan in one of the few accounts of an encounter with a severely perverse
masochist, Monsieur M, stresses that in perversion the capacity to fantasize is rudimentary and
that it only intervenes secondarily as a kind of narration and that it is exactly this failure of
individuation at the level of fantasy that renders the ego so much more dependent on elementary
experiences at the bodily level. As he states, ‘ The less active the fantasy, the more active the
actual behaviour. In other words, action and the process of mental visualization have an inverse
relationship.’. ( 1973, p.463)It is exactly this failure of the capacity to dream imaginatively
around sexuality that forces the perverse masochist to act out his or her fantasies in reality in
order to use bodily sensations to deny the illusionary quality of the fantasy.
Nydes in 1950 suggested that the alteration of consciousness and the changes in body feeling
states produced by the increasing sensual and tactile pleasure obtained during masturbation or
intercourse result in “ an illusory actualization of fantasies”. Lichtenstein also stressed that
orgasm tends to produce a confirmation of the sense of existence as well as a sense of validation
of unconscious fantasies. In more severe cases of perversion it would appear that neither sexual
excitement or orgasm are sufficient however and it is here that the masochist will begin to utilize
actual physical pain . In the case of severe perverse masochism that De M’Uzan described, as he
puts it:
the menace that hangs over his identity requires a massive intervention of sensori-motor experience, more
precisely that of pain…….the pain clearly participates in a setting in motion of, and in the violent
mounting of, sexual excitement, but it is above all the instrument of the process of individuation.

In perverse masochistic when the fantasies and the rituals bring into play pain, this is always an
indication that the protective function of the fantasy has not been actualized or is beginning to
breakdown.

The Function of Perverse Fantasy

If erotic masochistic fantasies have the aim of dissolving boundaries and transgressing limits in
order to achieve transformation through the union of opposites , the purpose of perverse
masochistic fantasies is exactly the opposite as here the function is that of shoring up the porous
boundaries of a fragile ego and protecting it from further traumatisation through a rigid control
over the perverse scenario. From the functional point of view, according to de M’Uzan,

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erotogenic masochism has a constructive function - the recovery of narcissistic integrity and
several Jungian works on perversion have stressed this constructive function of perversion.
Anthony Storr suggests that perversion represents a striving towards normality and that it is
possible to detect in the perversions evidence of the compensatory function of the unconscious
but at this point we need to ask ourselves what is the unconscious trying to compensate. Wyly
stresses that in perversion the behaviours are symbolic of childhood traumatic experiences and
they can be seen as an attempt to compensate them a view also endorsed by Ross who sees
perversion as a ‘response to early relational trauma’. ( p. 51) Such relational traumas bring into
play the defensive mechanism of profound dissociation which in turn leads to a maladaptive,
highly rigid and closed right brain system. One result is that the transcendent function which acts
to create bridges and links between consciousness and the unconscious, between inner and outer
reality, between fantasy and perception is severely damaged or fails to become established. It is
becoming increasingly clearer that such relational traumas are caused not only by catastrophic
episodes of abuse, sexual or physical but equally by cumulative trauma, neglect and carer
disengagement. Allan Schore in his foreword to Phillip Bromberg’s latest work The Shadow of
the Tsunami suggests that this closed and rigid right brain system ‘responds to even low levels of
intersubjective stress with the survival response of defensive parasympathetic dorsal vagal
hypoarousal and heart rate deceleration. This results in moments of “psychic death” and an
inability to maintain an inner sense of aliveness’. ( 2013, p.xxiii) This sense of inner deadness is
something that time and time again I have encountered in the perverse patients with whom I have
worked and is one of the most difficult things to overcome.
The result of relational trauma profoundly effects both the structure of the ego and the sense of
identity, not merely the sense of sexual identity as
psychoanalysts stress but the total self-identity as Ross points out. One of the fundamental
functions of the perverse fantasy therefore is to shore up the fragile sense of identity and to
protect the ego against any further traumatisation. If the individual has been unable to use fantasy
in this way or if the fantasy breaks down then there are very real risks of a collapse into
depression, into psychosomatic illness or even suicide.
In a case of mine of a young woman who was referred to me after a serious suicide attempt, we
discovered after some time in analysis that she had a fixed masochistic fantasy in which she
fantasies a sexual encounter while she was suspended from a butcher’s hook, a fantasy that she
used in masturbation but which evidently presented an impossibility of translation into a sexual
ritual without a real danger to her life. In this case the relational trauma was linked to the fact that
neither the mother nor the father seemed to have no perception of the child as a human being with

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her own personality and needs. She was constantly shunted on to other relatives and generally
treated as a nuisance. She seems to have been of interest to her parents only as a sexual object.
She combined character and perverse masochism and in her sexual relationships she alternated
long-term relationships of a sadomasochistic character with both men and women, with
promiscuous relationships with men in which she showed a remarkable capacity to get herself
treated like a slab of meat. Characteristically she found these relationships more sexually
satisfying. In this case the perverse fantasy is both dangerous and poorly organised and as we can
see from the suicide attempt it had little protective or healing function. Obviously, this young
woman without help would have run a serious risk of death either through suicide or through a
successful attempt to actualise her fantasy with a sexual sadist. Another young woman patient of
mine eventually admitted to a masochistic fantasy dating from adolescence. In her fantasy a
young woman in a subservient position, usually a secretary, is obliged to undergo a humiliating
sexual act with a much older man who is her boss. The woman is completely passive and is
marked by an extreme pallor. This fantasy is used both in masturbation and in heterosexual
intercourse with her partner to achieve orgasm. Interestingly enough this fantasy took shape only
after this young woman had managed to get herself brutally sodomized by a person in a position
of trust. With the birth of the fantasy she no longer exposed herself to situations in which she
risked serious harm to herself. In the past she had many transient sexual relationships in which
she felt humiliated and in which she would behave in a similar fashion as in the fantasy. The
pallor of the woman in the fantasy resembled in her own words, that of a corpse, just as her
extreme passivity during intercourse enabled her to fantasize herself as dead. This allowed her
both to triumph over her partners and at the same time it allowed her to represent her feelings of
inner deadness and to reverse them through the sexual excitement and orgasm. In this case the
fantasy and the subtle actualization of the fantasy were sufficient to protect her against more
dangerous enactments although the feelings of deadness remained intense leading to depression
and psychosomatic complaints that pushed her towards analysis.

Robert Stoller in Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred, has suggested that perverse fantasy
represents both the presentation of the relational trauma and the attempt to reverse it. As he notes:
if one examines the fantasy, ignoring no details, I think one finds embedded therein remnants of
the individual’s experience with other people who in the real world, during childhood, provoked
the reaction that we call perversion. And at the centre is hostility.

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For Stoller the function of the perverse fantasy is not just to present the relational trauma, as at
the same time, it works to reverse it. Through the fantasy, the child who felt like his parent’s slave
becomes a master, the child who was treated as an inanimate or dead object, dehumanizes the
partner who is turned into something less than human, sometimes even to the point of
transformation of the partner into something inanimate or dead. We can see this clearly from the
case of a sadistic perversion reported by Medard Boss. Boss describes how Eric Klotz’s
experience of absolute solitude and his feeling that bodies were not alive but inanimate,
something more like a statue or a mass of metal, could only be dissolved through his sadistic
practices. In normal sexual intercourse Klotz was unable to experience either his own body or
that of his partner as living flesh . Only when the pain he inflicted on his partner produced tears
and groans, only when he saw blood flowing was he able to experience himself and his partner
as living human beings and to feel a sense of communion between his masculinity and her
femininity. Essential to his pleasure however was the desire of the other, the feeling that the other
experienced pleasure, that she was collaborating with him. If she showed no signs of pain or
opposed resistance then he would either loose interest or would fly into a rage with
accompanying fantasies of dismembering or even setting on fire his partner. Resistance
therefore increased the violence of the attacks against the partner’s boundaries.. Eric Klotz helps
us to understand that at least in some sadistic fantasies, the fantasy and the ritual are linked to the
need to unite and transcend the opposition between animate and inanimate for such perverts are
frozen into a world of inanimate objects. Klotz begins his ritual with the sensation that both he
and his partner are inanimate statues but through the pain and pleasure, the partner becomes
transformed into something living and this in turn transforms Klotz’s sense of being a thing and
allows him to feel alive. an animate human being. The problem here however is the illusionary
nature of this transformation of the self-image which is insufficient to bring about any real
change in the ego structure and can therefore only be endlessly repeated.
If in sadism the reversal of the relational trauma is evident the same would appear not to be true
for masochism where on the surface it seems as though the masochist remains a victim. As Victor
Smirnoff has pointed out however in an important article on the role of the contract in
masochism, the power of the masochist’s partner is purely fictitious:
Masochism is a defiance. It is expressed through the masochist’s apparently passive behaviour, by
his compliance with the inflicted pain and humiliation, by his claims of being enslaved and used.
In fact the masochist knows that his position is simply the result of his own power: the power of
endowing the executioner with the obligation of playing the role of a master, when indeed he is
only a slave, a creation of the masochist’s desire. (1969,p. 668)

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This is the fundamental difference between religious suffering, erotic masochistic fantasies, and
perverse masochistic fantasies: in the first two there is a real surrender to the power of the other
while in perverse masochism the submission to the other is deceptive and any real possibility of
transformation is foreclosed. This is the real tragedy of the perverse masochist who on the one
hand ardently desires to be able to surrender to the other to transform the fragile ego and on the
other, is faced with the impossibility of this surrender as it would simply mean recreating the
original trauma of the rejecting and indifferent maternal figure.

The Aesthetics of Erotic and Masochistic Fantasies

When we look at a dream or a fantasy, I would suggest that it is not sufficient to take into
consideration the conceptual articulation of the meaning of the dream contents; we must also be
able to assess the aesthetic value of the dream metaphors: their originality; the power of their
expressive capacity to give form to unprocessed experiences; their ability to link together
different experiences and to hold the creative tension between thought and sensation, feeling and
intuition, in order to add something new to the personal and collective context. It is when a
metaphor becomes capable of holding this creative tension that it becomes truly symbolic in as
much as in assumes to itself that quality of being operative, of constituting itself as a “generator
of activity” which as the Italian Jungian analyst Mario Trevi says, “ is located in the mid-point
between two activities ( or if one prefers, two functions): the com-positive activity that produces
it and the com-positive activity that it produces”. (1986,p.68) If we look at the images of perverse
masochistic fantasies however what we can see is that this metaphorical capacity has failed to be
established or has broken down and the symbolic work of dreaming and fantasy whose function
is to transform the raw data of experience, sensations, perceptions and emotions, into
psychological form is not present. Jung, in the Kindertraume notes that in severe trauma, the
dream work fails and the dream is simply a reproduction of a real event which continually
repeats itself without any metaphorical or symbolical transformation and any attempt at
interpretation or at conscious assimilation thus proves useless. As he writes:
The dream is never a mere repetition of previous experiences, with only one specific exception:
shock or shell-shock dreams, which sometimes are completely identical repetitions of reality.
That, in fact, is a proof of the traumatic effect. The shock can no longer be psychified. This can

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be seen especially clearly in healing processes in which the psyche tries to translate the shock into
a psychic anxiety situation. (2008,p.21)
In the same way, in perverse masochistic fantasies the images are not psychified but are merely
repetitions of the traumatic reality suffered in childhood. As Stoller reminds us, in the
masochistic fantasy, we can find the repetition of the traumatic events experienced with real
people in the real world. It is for this reason that in perverse masochism, the fantasy remains
absolutely unchanging and static, incapable of performing any psychic work and of bringing
about any real psychic transformation. They can only be endlessly repeated in a sterile ritual that
in no way can lead to individuation.

Clinical Vignette

I would like here to illustrate some of these points by referring to the case of a man I have been
treating now for many years whom I will call Sebastian. When he arrived in my consulting room
for the first time I found myself face to face with a tall, good looking adolescent with a very
powerful and athletic body. His initial complaints were centred around his feelings of apathy and
inertia and his difficulties in establishing relationships with girls. He told me that he felt that his
life often seemed to him useless and empty. The precipitating factor in his seeking analysis was
however an obsessive and overwhelming fear that he was loosing his hair, a fear which he dated
from the time when he was turned down by a girl he was in love with. He was adamant that if he
did begin to loose his hair, he would have to kill himself. Gradually over time it became clear that
behind the fear of loosing his hair, there was hidden another much more primitive fear: the terror
that if the perfect body he cultivated so assiduously showed even the slightest imperfection, then
he would fall to pieces and his whole self would literally unravel. In his fantasy the world itself
would disappear into an abyss of nothingness. After a few years he was able to bring himself to
confess to me his perverse masochistic fantasies which had begun around the age of 7 years. In
the fantasy he has been captured by a group of older women who have gagged him and tied him
up with his hands bound behind his back and a cord around his neck in such a way that he is
completely immobilized. He is to be the slave of one of the women who looks like his mother
and what he finds most exciting is that this woman seems to be completely indifferent to him.

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In masochistic bondage fantasies, being tied up gives the subject the sensation of being
immobilised, of being unable to oppose any resistance to the will of the partner and thus serves
to increase the partner’s power but in more severe forms, where the subject is immobilised in a
painful and dangerous way, it is linked to the idea of being deprived of one of the principle
characteristics of higher animal life, that of being able to move. In such cases the bondage defines
the subjective reality of the masochist as one of feeling oneself to be a thing, an inanimate object.
As he grew into adolescence, the fantasy took on more sexual overtones and he imagined that he
is forced to kiss the feet and buttocks of the women and to have sexual relations with them.
Sebastian was obsessed with his sexual performance and during a relationship he was terrified by
the idea that he could loose his erection. During sexual intercourse he was able to feel at ease
only if his partner was willing to tie him up and participate with him in actualize the fantasy.
From Sebastian’s account of himself it became gradually clear that during his childhood and
infancy his mother was unable to tolerate the vitality of his masculine body and that she
interpreted any active or autonomous movement on his part as an aggressive and sadistic attack.
We can assume that any attempt to interact physically with his mother and to engage her interest
provoked a withdrawal and a reaction of refusal of his corporeal reality and indeed on more than
one occasion he risked dying during his infancy as his mother had forgotten about him. Only
when he behaved like an inanimate doll that she could play with, was she able to bring herself to
interact with him. Sebastian’s only possibility of maintaining a relationship with the maternal
figure was to freeze, to inhibit any vigorous movements in order to become completely immobile.
The only part of his body that remained vital was his penis hence his terror at the thought of
loosing his erection. This freezing of his infantile body is illustrated in a dream that came after
some years of analysis:

I am visiting my mother’s homeland and I meet my aunt but I can’t find my little cousin and my aunt says
that she doesn’t know what has happened to him. I find out that he has gone to the house of my mother’s
parents but that he had got cold and had turned back. I look everywhere for him and I find him in a frozen
alarm clock. I wait until the ice melts to see if my cousin comes out.

Working with trauma requires at least in the initial stages of the therapy, a very different way of
working from that that to which we are habituated. For Bohleber, in cases of trauma, analysis of
the transference and the countertransference only in the here-and- now of the analytical
relationship with the emergence of meaningful narratives without any narrative reconstruction of
the causative traumatic reality, risks failing to help the patient to distinguish between phantasy
and reality, and in the worst case, of retraumatizing the patient.(2007,p.343) Instead what is at

16
stake is the reconstruction of the traumatic event. As the author writes, “ Discovering the reality
of the trauma and its associated affects, namely its historicization, however fragmentary or
approximate, is the prerequisite for elucidating and comprehending its secondary revision and
transformation by unconscious phantasies and meanings”.(2007,p.342) In this way phantasy and
reality are disentangled opening the way to psychic integration and a restructuring of the sense of
self and of the gender identity. Much of my early work with Sebastian was based on this
reconstruction of the actual trauma undergone but for this to take place however what is at stake
is above all the analyst’s affective responses for it is only the analyst’s empathic attitude that can
help the patient accept the reality of the relational trauma. Important as this is, even this is not
sufficient however if we are to be able to transform the sterile and repetitive perverse fantasy into
a true erotic fantasy. Here the fundamental factor for change and transformation is the metaphoric
capacity of the analyst, the ability to find or invent metaphors capable of allowing the subject to
‘psychify’ the trauma, to be able to represent it as a psychic fact.

The Aesthetics of Masochistic Fantasies

In the case of a young woman, Silvia, who presented with a severe depression and a masochistic
perversion with a history of extreme maternal neglect, episodes of physical and emotional abuse
and an episode of sexual abuse at the hands of a neighbour, the capacity for fantasy and
symbolization was extremely curtailed to the point that in this case there was no masochistic
fantasy only masochistic rituals in which pain played an important role. From the age of 22
whenever she felt abandoned by her sexual partners she would begin to pull out her eyebrows to
the point that in moments of marked tension or depression she would have no eyebrows left.
The deficit in the capacity for symbolization was reflected in her initial dreams which were
characterized by a peculiar flat quality of the metaphorical dream images which were disturbingly
similar to the images of a cartoon. Nothing ever really happened in these dreams nor did she
show any emotional reaction to the images either within the dream experience itself or when she
narrated the dream. It became increasingly clear to me that she was unable to use the dreams in
any meaningful way to gain insight or to enrich her impoverished psychic reality. The real state of
her psyche was reflected by later dreams in which she sees images of women who are
transformed into suitcases or in which she dreams she is at an open market and sees on the stall of
a butcher the torso of a woman with no head, arms, legs, breasts or genitals, the living flesh of a
woman reduced to the level of a piece of meat to be sold and consumed. As Angela Carter writes

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 in ‘The Sadeian Woman’ , flesh reduced to meat, “ has lost its common factor; that it is the
substance of which we are all made and yet that differentiates us. It has acquired instead , the
function of confusing kind and gender, man and beast, woman and fowl”. (1979,p.146)

Silvia’s relationships were characterized by sadomasochistic dynamics and the analytical

relationship too rapidly became contaminated by similar dynamics. She constantly attempted to
control me challenging the rules of the setting, devaluing my interpretation and leaving me no
space for reflection, while at the same time she experienced me as a sadistic figure. At the
beginning my attention was concentrated on these transference and countertransference
dynamics but all my interpretative attempts in this direction were at best ineffective and at worst
counterproductive to the point that Silvia began to talk about leaving analysis. It was only when I
gradually became aware of the particular non-metaphorical character of the dream images and the
complete lack of any affect attached to then that it became increasingly clear to me that she was
unable to use the dreams in any meaningful way to gain insight or to enrich her impoverished
psychic reality. Only when I was able to make use of my metaphorical capacity to provide Silvia
with a metaphorical image that reflected her gender confusion and her sense of lack of identity,
did something change and she began to be able to make use of her dreams to bring about
profound changes in her psychic structure. This transformation is reflected in two dreams from
the concluding phase of the analysis which show how the perverse images of relationship have
taken on a much more erotic and religious colouring.

I dreamt I saw a humanized figure of Christ who says to me: I am the Christ, the living God and I am in
love with you. The face of Christ is elongated with beautiful intense eyes and dark hair. In fact the figure is
very similar to that of the classical Byzantine iconography but this Christ has a ugly monkey- like mouth
with very long gums and perhaps even a double row of teeth. The nail of the right thumb is black and
twisted at the base. I had faith in him and I was not afraid.

The erotic and religious overtones of this dream are obvious but I think what is most relevant is
the image of the possibility of erotic union with a transcendent figure that combines within itself
human, animal and spiritual characteristics, a figure that is both Christ and the Devil but to which
she is able to surrender with faith that this surrender will not harm her. This theme of the union of
opposites is repeated in one of the last dreams.
I am at home with a girlfriend and I realize that it is late and that she needs to go home. Its 23.15 but the
sun is still up, a beautiful golden luminous sun. I don’t understand why it hasn’t set. My friend leaves and
I am waiting for her to call to tell me she has arrived safely. It’s now 1.15 in the morning but the sun is still

18
there and my mother tells me it’s an eclipse in reversal. I look outside and I see the sun and the moon
together but its still daylight.

It is unusual to encounter such clearly alchemical images as in this dream where we have a clear
reference to the coniunctio between Sol and Luna. In this eclipse in reverse, a real opera contra
natura, we can see how the analytical process has brought about a transformation of body and
spirit. Luna, the symbol of the body has become the full moon, a metaphor for the spiritualized
body while Sol, the symbol of the spirit has been transformed into an autumn sun, a sun that
warms but no longer burns, a perfect metaphor for a spirit that has become corporeal. Now Sol
and Luna no longer destroy each other but can unite in an equal and complementary relationship.

Conclusion

Working with perverse patients in whom the incapacity to symbolize and to use erotic fantasies to
further the individuation process is prominent, requires a very particular attitude on the part of the
analyst. Rather than concentrating on the transference and countertransference dynamics what is
required is the capacity of the analyst to help the patient accept the reality of the trauma while at
the same time helping the patient to restore the metaphorical capacity to use dreams and fantasies
to transform the inner reality. Only in this way is it possible to begin to work on the way in
which they dehumanized themselves and others and thus to open the way to the possibility of
using erotic fantasy to further individuation.

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