Courtesy of: Author: Dorothy Hayden, CSW, CAC
A number of years ago, in
connection with my work with sexual addiction, a number of lifestyle
submissives started coming to me for treatment. Some of these people were
extremely hesitant to discuss their reasons for seeking therapy; they were so
ashamed of their fantasies and behaviors that it took years of working with
them until I knew their real names or their telephone numbers. Patients who
able to be forthcoming about their masochistic behaviors and fantasies were as
confused as I was. One of my patients, giving me a written masochistic fantasy
after months of resistance, said, "Here it is. This is what I came to
therapy for. It's terrible. It's sick. It's wonderful. I hate it; it's my
favorite fantasy. I can't stand it, I love it. It's disgusting. I don't want to
stop it."
Learning about the world of
S&M has been an invaluable experience to me. I had to admit to myself that,
viewed from the perspective of what I knew about the nature of the individual
self, masochism puzzled me by flying in the face of everything that was
rational about the nature of the human personality. People want to be happy and
to avoid pain and suffering. They seek to maintain and increase their control
over themselves and their surroundings. And they desire to maintain and increase
their prestige, respect, and esteem. Viewed from the perspective of these three
principles about the self, masochism is a startling paradox. The self is
developed to avoid pain, but masochists seek pain. The self strives for
control, but masochists seek to relinquish control. The self aims to maximize
its esteem, but masochists deliberately seek out humiliation.
I heard stories of whips,
canes, racks, cock-and-ball torture, dripping wax on naked skin, electronic
devices designed to deliver just the right amount of pain, the difficulty of
finding the right mistress, and the surprising number of "dungeons"
that existed within a few block radius of my mid-town office. Time and again,
men would talk of the frustration of being unable to entice their wives or
partners, who found these sexual activities to be perverse, into engaging in
the sexual behaviors that they most longed for.
I suspected that there was a
vast number of people who felt tremendous shame and isolation about masochistic
submissive longings. I decided to check the clinical literature on masochism to
better arm myself with some psychodynamic understanding of why these men, who
so often felt shame-bound, were so keen to be dominated, hurt, tortured and
humiliated by strong, dominate women.
This is what my research
revealed: According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American
Psychiatric Association, (the shrink's bible), anyone who engages regularly in
masochistic sex is mentally ill by definition. There is a long tradition of regarding
masochism as the activity of mentally ill sick individuals. Freud described
masochism as a perversion. One of his followers linked masochism to
cannibalism, criminality, necrophilia and vampirism. Another analyst said that
all neurotics are masochistics. In short, clinical perspectives have regarded
masochists as seriously disturbed.
Krafft-Ebing, the
nineteenth-century psychiatrist who coined the term, subsumed masochism under
the broad heading of "General Pathology" in this famous volume,
Psychopath Sexualize, in 1876. Masochism became a pathological, sexual and
psychopathic phenomenon all at once.
"By masochism I understand
a particular 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 colored by lustful feeling; 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."
It has become practically a
dogma of psychoanalytic thought that masochism is a sexual condition in which
punishment is required before satisfaction can be reached. Freud understood the
phenomenon as resulting from an "unconscious feeling of guilt" as
"a need for punishment by some parental authority. Writing in 1919, Freud
found the genesis and reference point for masochism in the Oedipus-complex.
Masochism, he said, actually begins in infantile sexuality, when the wish for
the incestuous connection with mother or father must be repressed. Guilt enters
at this point, in connection with incestuous wishes. The parent figure then
becomes the dispenser of punishment instead of love and appears in desires for
beating, spanking, etc. The fantasy of being beaten becomes the meeting place
between the sense of guilt and sexual love. Whether it involves literal pain or
not, the punishment desired by the masochist is enjoyed in and of itself.
Punishment and satisfaction both give pleasure - and humiliation. Freud, in
referring to masochism as a "perversion", cemented it forever in the
ghetto of the aberrant and deviant.
My research, however, did not
jibe with my clinical reality. The people who presented to me were not immature
or inferior. In fact, the reverse seemed to be the case. Masochists are more
likely to be successful by social standards: professionally, sexually,
emotionally, culturally, in marriages or out. They are frequently individuals
of inner strength of character, possessed of strong coping skills with an
ethical sense of individual responsibility. A famous study of the "sexual
profile of men in power" found to the researchers' surprise, a high
quantity of masochistic sexual activity among successful politicians, judges
and other important and influential men.
It became obvious to me that
psychology's theories of masochism were obsolete. In the 1960's, homosexuality
was deleted from the DSMIV and was recognized not as a pathology, but as a
lifestyle choice. It is my contention that the same should be done with masochism
and that, like homosexuality, it needs to be removed from the rubric of
"psychopathology" and be seen for what it is: a sexual lifestyle
choice. It is the intention of this paper to suggest ways of understanding
masochism without invoking theories of mental illness.
The questions, however,
remained. I puzzled as to why so many men, raised in a culture that valued
masculine initiative, assertiveness, and dominance, want to be relieved of
these qualities and surrender their will to a strong, dominant woman who might
torture, control and humiliate them. What was the basis of this compelling urge
to surrender and serve, to relinquish control, to accept physical pain and
emotional humiliation?
As I listened to my patients
over the years, I began to see masochism less as a sexual aberration and more
as a metaphor through which psyche speaks of its suffering and passion. There
was a definite connection between suffering and pleasure the intrigued me.
Clients spoke of the rapturous delight in submission, the worship, in wild
abandon and the deliverance from the confining bondage of "normalcy".
Ritualized suffering seemed to
be a way of giving meaning and value to human infirmities. After all, there is
no paucity of suffering in human life. None of us need go looking for pain. The
suffering of helplessness, disappointment, loss, powerlessness and limitation,
is a part of the human condition. It is my hunch that there is something like a
universal need, wish or longing for surrender completely to certain aspects of
human life and that it assumes many forms. This passionate longing to surrender
comes into play in at least some instances of masochism. Submission, losing
oneself to the power of the other, becoming enslaved to the master is the
ever-available lookalike to surrender.
Submissives speak of a quality
of liberation, freedom and expansion of the self in a scene as a situation
similar to the letting down of defensive barriers. They speak of the experience
of complete vulnerability. I believe that buried or frozen, is a longing for
something in the environment to make possible surrender, a sense of yielding of
the false self. The false self is an idea developed by a famous psychoanalyst
who posited that most parents need their children to behave in circumscribed
ways in order for the child to receive their love. For a child, parental love
is a matter of survival, and so the child forges a "self" that they
think will ensure parental love and approval. The false self is usually a
"caretaker" self. A Scene sometimes allows for years of defensive
barriers that support the false self to be broken through. It carries with it a
longing for the birth of the true self. Deep down we long to give up, to
"come clean", as part of a general longing to be known or recognized.
The prospect of surrender may be accompanied by a feeling of dread and or
relief or even ecstasy. It is an experience of being "in the moment",
totally in the present. Its ultimate direction is the discovery of one's
identity, one's sense of self, of one's sense of wholeness, even one's sense of
unity with other living beings. Joyous in spirit, it transcends the pain that
evokes it. One's exquisite pain is sometimes akin to mystical ecstasy. Within
the context of that surrender, a self-negating submissive experience occurs in
which the person is enthralled by the dominant partner. The intensity of the
masochism is a living testimonial of the urgency with which some buried part of
the personality is screaming to be released. The surrender is nothing less than
a controlled dissolution of self-boundaries.
The deeper yearning is the
longing to be reached, known and accepted in a safe environment which
narcissistic, dysfunctional or preoccupied parents were unable to provide the
child at a young age.
Fantasies of being raped, which
are very common, can have all manners of meanings. Among them, one will almost
always find, sometimes deeply buried, a yearning for deep surrender. The
submissive longs for and wishes to be found, recognized, penetrated to the
core, so as to become real, or, as one analyst says it "to come into
being."
In addition to the longing to
surrender into a truer sense of self, masochistic behaviors have another
meaning. People need and take delight in fantasy production. Ask the Disneyland
folk who cater to adults as much as to children. Scenes have tremendous
potential for potentiating fantasy. Costumes, rituals, scenarios, an endless
variety of sex props, and elaborate sets reveal of the richness the creative
inner life and speak to the very real human need for fantasy play. The
fantasies are the carriers of a full spectrum of human feelings: to control, to
be controlled, to tease, to be teased, to play, to please, and to achieve
solace from the confines of the mundaness of ordinary life. They represent the
suspension of normal reality that is an occasional necessity for all healthy
people.
Probably the last thing
masochism appears aimed at is balance. In keeping with its paradoxical nature,
masochism provides not so much a state of weakness, but a sense of surrender,
receptivity and sensitivity. Masochism is the condition of submitting fully to
an experience, which counters lives that, in our Western society, are
ego-centered, constrained, rational, and competitive. Strength can be a
terrible burden. It is a constraint, which can be relieved in moments of
abandonment, of letting down and letting go. So it is hardly surprising that
the pull of masochistic experiences should be so strong in a culture the
overvalues ego strength at the expense of a fuller experience of all dimensions
of psychic life.
In conclusion, I believe that
therapists need to radically alter their approach to doing psychotherapy with
masochistic patients. My colleagues complain that masochists are difficult to
"cure". Perhaps because the paradigm from which these therapists
operate are faulty. The recognition of value and meaning in the desire to
suffer humiliation runs counter to the prevailing attitude in psychology. The
main thrust of modern theory and practice has been toward ego psychology. The
values of psychotherapy have been aimed, for the most part, at building strong,
coping, rational problem-solving egos. Ego-values are certainly worthy ones,
yet it costs something to gain strength, to cope, to be rational and to solve problems.
This may account for the dissatisfaction many people feel after years of
psychotherapy. Building a strong ego is only one side of the story; it neglects
other, crucial parts of the human psyche. Modern psychology has been in large
measure dominated by helping people develop independence, strength, achievement
decisive action, coping and planning. What's missing is attention to the more
subtle dimensions of soul.
The psychoanalyst most in tuned
with the missing element in psychotherapeutic work with masochism is Carl Jung.
Masochism may be imagined as cultivation of what Jung called the
"shadow" - the darker, mostly unconscious part of the psyche which he
regarded not as a sickness, but as an essential part of the human psyche. The
shadow is the tunnel, channel, or connector through which one reaches the
deepest, most elemental layers of psyche. Going through the tunnel, or breaking
the ego defenses down, one feels reduced and degraded. Usually, we try to bring
the shadow under the ego's domination. Embracing the shadow, on the other hand,
provides a fuller sense of self-knowledge, self-acceptance and a fuller sense
of being alive. Jung's idea of the shadow involves force and passivity, horror
and beauty, power and impotence, straightness and perversion, infantilism,
wisdom and foolishness. The experience of the shadow is humiliating and
occasionally frightening, but it is a reduction to life‹to essential life,
which includes suffering, pain, powerlessness and humiliation. Submission to
masochistic pain, loss of control and humiliation serves to embrace our shadow
rather than deny it. The result is the achievement of an inner life that
accepts and embraces all aspects of our selves and allows us to live with a
deeper sense of our true selves.
In conclusion, the
psychotherapeutic community needs to re-examine masochistic submissions to see
it not as a pathology but as a healthy vehicle for surrendering fixed defense
mechanisms, for relinquishing control to something or someone greater than
themselves, for achieving freedom from the pervasive and relentless need to
cultivate, promote and assert the self, for gaining some relief from having to
make innumerable choices and decisions, for engaging in healthy fantasy
enactments, and for the exploration, acknowledge and acceptance the
"darker" or "shadow" side of their personalities. In
addition, many patients speak of achieving a loss of self-awareness that they
describe as ecstasy or bliss in which the individual transcends his normal
limits and ceases to be aware of self in ordinary terms.
A travesty of our profession is
that we continue to try to "cure" a systems of beliefs and behaviors
that enrich and enlivens the lives of so many people. The continuing
pathologizing of masochism by keeping it in the DSMIV as a psychopathology and
by most therapists' efforts to "cure" masochists is in part
responsible for the continued , shame, isolation and low self-esteem of these
creative, spontaneous and courage people who want to be afforded the dignity of
choosing their own form of non-exploitative sexuality.
Dorothy Hayden, MBA, CSW, CAC,
received her masters degree in clinical social work from New York University
and has received advanced clinical training at the Post Graduate Center for
Mental Health. She is a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City.
E-mail:dhayden09@yahoo.com.
Dorothy Hayden, CSW, CAC
209 East 10th Street #14
New York, NY
