Freud - Complete Works (262 page)

   In ordinary speech the
connotation of sadism oscillates between, on the one hand, cases
merely characterized by an active or violent attitude to the sexual
object, and, on the other hand, cases in which satisfaction is
entirely conditional on the humiliation and maltreatment of the
object. Strictly speaking, it is only this last extreme instance
which deserves to be described as a perversion.

   Similarly, the term masochism
comprises any passive attitude towards sexual life and the sexual
object, the extreme instance of which appears to be that in which
satisfaction is conditional upon suffering physical or mental pain
at the hands of the sexual object. Masochism, in the form of a
perversion, seems to be further removed from the normal sexual aim
than its counterpart; it may be doubted at first whether it can
ever occur as a primary phenomenon or whether, on the contrary, it
may not invariably arise from a transformation of
sadism.¹  It can often be shown that masochism is nothing
more than an extension of sadism turned round upon the
subject’s own self, which thus, to begin with, takes the
place of the sexual object. Clinical analysis of extreme cases of
masochistic perversion show that a great number of factors (such as
the castration complex and the sense of guilt) have combined to
exaggerate and fixate the original passive sexual attitude.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1924:] My opinion of
masochism has been to a large extent altered by later reflection,
based upon certain hypotheses as to the structure of the apparatus
of the mind and the classes of instincts operating in it. I have
been led to distinguish a primary or
erotogenic
masochism,
out of which two later forms,
feminine
and
moral
masochism, have developed. Sadism which cannot find employment in
actual life is turned round upon the subject’s own self and
so produces a
secondary
masochism, which is superadded to
the primary kind. (Cf. Freud, 1924
c
.)

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1485

   Pain, which is overridden in such
cases, thus falls into line with disgust and shame as a force that
stands in opposition and resistance to the libido.

   Sadism and masochism occupy a
special position among the perversions, since the contrast between
activity and passivity which lies behind them is among the
universal characteristics of sexual life.

   The history of human civilization
shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between
cruelty and the sexual instinct; but nothing has been done towards
explaining the connection, apart from laying emphasis on the
aggressive factor in the libido. According to some authorities this
aggressive element of the sexual instinct is in reality a relic of
cannibalistic desires - that is, it is a contribution derived from
the apparatus for obtaining mastery, which is concerned with the
satisfaction of the other and, ontogenetically, the older of the
great instinctual needs.¹ It has also been maintained that
every pain contains in itself the possibility of a feeling of
pleasure. All that need be said is that no satisfactory explanation
of this perversion has been put forward and that it seems possible
that a number of mental impulses are combined in it to produce a
single resultant.²

   But the most remarkable feature
of this perversion is that its active and passive forms are
habitually found to occur together in the same individual. A person
who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual
relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which
he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at
the same time a masochist, although the active or the passive
aspect of the perversion may be the more strongly developed in him
and may represent his predominant sexual activity.³

   We find, then, that certain among
the impulses to perversion occur regularly as pairs of opposites;
and this, taken in conjunction with material which will be brought
forward later, has a high theoretical significance.
⁴
It is, moreover, a suggestive fact
that the existence of the pair of opposites formed by sadism and
masochism cannot be attributed merely to the element of
aggressiveness. We should rather be inclined to connect the
simultaneous presence of these opposites with the opposing
masculinity and femininity which are combined in bisexuality - a
contrast which often has to be replaced in psycho-analysis by that
between activity and passivity.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1915:] Cf. my
remarks below on the pregenital phases of sexual development, which
confirm this view.

  
²
[
Footnote added
1924:] The enquiry
mentioned above has led me to assign a peculiar position, based
upon the origin of the instincts, to the pair of opposites
constituted by sadism and masochism, and to place them outside the
class of the remaining ‘perversions’.

  
³
Instead of multiplying the evidence for
this statement, I will quote a passage from Havelock Ellis (1913,
119): ‘The investigation of histories of sadism and
masochism, even those given by Krafft-Ebing (as indeed Colin Scott
and Féré have already pointed out), constantly
reveals traces of both groups of phenomena in the same
individual.’

  
⁴
[
Footnote added
1915:] Cf. my
discussion of ‘ambivalence’ below.

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1486

(3)
THE PERVERSIONS IN GENERAL

VARIATION AND
DISEASE
   It is natural that medical men, who
first studied perversions in

                                          
outstanding examples and under special conditions, should have been
inclined to regard them, like inversion, as indications of
degeneracy or disease. Nevertheless, it is even easier to dispose
of that view in this case than in that of inversion. Everyday
experience has shown that most of these extensions, or at any rate
the less severe of them, are constituents which are rarely absent
from the sexual life of healthy people, and are judged by them no
differently from other intimate events. If circumstances favour
such an occurrence, normal people too can substitute a perversion
of this kind for the normal sexual aim for quite a time, or can
find place for the one alongside the other. No healthy person, it
appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called
perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this
finding is in itself enough to show how inappropriate it is to use
the word perversion as a term of reproach. In the sphere of sexual
life we are brought up against peculiar and, indeed, insoluble
difficulties as soon as we try to draw a sharp line to distinguish
mere variations within the range of what is physiological from
pathological symptoms.

   Nevertheless, in some of these
perversions the quality of the new sexual aim is of a kind to
demand special examination. Certain of them are so far removed from
the normal in their content that we cannot avoid pronouncing them
‘pathological’. This is especially so where (as, for
instance, in cases of licking excrement or of intercourse with dead
bodies ) the sexual instinct goes to astonishing lengths in
successfully overriding the resistances of shame, disgust, horror
or pain. But even in such cases we should not be too ready to
assume that people who act in this way will necessarily turn out to
be insane or subject to grave abnormalities of other kinds. Here
again we cannot escape from the fact that people whose behaviour is
in other respects normal can, under the domination of the most
unruly of all the instincts, put themselves in the category of sick
persons in the single sphere of sexual life. On the other hand,
manifest abnormality in the other relations of life can invariably
be shown to have a background of abnormal sexual conduct.

   In the majority of instances the
pathological character in a perversion is found to lie not in the
content
of the new sexual aim but in its relation to the
normal. If a perversion, instead of appearing merely
alongside
the normal sexual aim and object, and only when
circumstances are unfavourable to
them
and favourable to
it
- if, instead of this, it ousts them completely and takes
their place in all circumstances - if, in short, a perversion has
the characteristics of exclusiveness and fixation - then we shall
usually be justified in regarding it as a pathological symptom.

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1487

THE MENTAL
FACTOR IN THE PERVERSIONS
   It is perhaps in
connection precisely with the most

                                                                       
repulsive perversions that the mental factor must be regarded as
playing its largest part in the transformation of the sexual
instinct. It is impossible to deny that in their case a piece of
mental work has been performed which, in spite of its horrifying
result, is the equivalent of an idealization of the instinct. The
omnipotence of love is perhaps never more strongly proved than in
such of its aberrations as these. The highest and the lowest are
always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality: ‘vom
Himmel durch die Welt zur Hölle.’¹

TWO
CONCLUSIONS
   Our study of the perversions has
shown us that the sexual instinct has to

                            
       struggle against certain
mental forces which act as resistances, and of which shame and
disgust are the most prominent. It is permissible to suppose that
these forces play a part in restraining that instinct within the
limits that are regarded as normal; and if they develop in the
individual before the sexual instinct has reached its full
strength, it is no doubt they that will determine the course of its
development.²

   In the second place we have found
that some of the perversions which we have examined are only made
intelligible if we assume the convergence of several motive forces.
If such perversions admit of analysis, that is, if they can be
taken to pieces, then they must be of a composite nature. This
gives us a hint that perhaps the sexual instinct itself may be no
simple thing, but put together from components which have come
apart again in the perversions. If this is so, the clinical
observation of these abnormalities will have drawn our attention to
amalgamations which have been lost to view in the uniform behaviour
of normal people.³

  
¹
[‘From Heaven, across the world, to
Hell.’]

  
²
[
Footnote added
1915:] On the other
hand, these forces which act like dams upon sexual development -
disgust, shame and morality - must also be regarded as historical
precipitates of the external inhibitions to which the sexual
instinct has been subjected during the psychogenesis of the human
race. We can observe the way in which, in the development of
individuals, they arise at the appropriate moment, as though
spontaneously, when upbringing and external influence give the
signal.

  
³
[
Footnote added
1920:] As regards
the origin of the perversions, I will add a word in anticipation of
what is to come. There is reason to suppose that, just as in the
case of fetishism, abortive beginnings of normal sexual development
occur before the perversions become fixated. Analytic investigation
has already been able to show in a few cases that perversions are a
residue of development towards the Oedipus complex and that after
the repression of that complex the components of the sexual
instinct which are strongest in the disposition of the individual
concerned emerge once more.

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(4)  THE SEXUAL INSTINCT IN NEUROTICS

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
   An
important addition to our knowledge of the sexual instinct in
certain

                                
people who at least approximate to the normal can be obtained from
a source which can only be reached in one particular way. There is
only one means of obtaining exhaustive information that will not be
misleading about the sexual life of the persons known as
‘psychoneurotics’ - sufferers from hysteria, from
obsessional neurosis, from what is wrongly described as
neurasthenia, and, undoubtedly, from dementia praecox and paranoia
was well. They must be subjected to psycho-analytic investigation,
which is employed in the therapeutic procedure introduced by Josef
Breuer and myself in 1893 and known at that time as
’catharsis’.

   I must first explain - as I have
already done in other writings - that all my experience shows that
these psychoneuroses are based on sexual instinctual forces. By
this I do not merely mean that the energy of the sexual instinct
makes a contribution to the forces that maintain the pathological
manifestations (the symptoms). I mean expressly to assert that that
contribution is the most important and only constant source of
energy of the neurosis and that in consequence the sexual life of
the persons in question is expressed - whether exclusively or
principally or only partly - in these symptoms. As I have put it
elsewhere, the symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the
patient. The evidence for this assertion is derived from the
ever-increasing number of psycho-analyses of hysterical and other
neurotics which I have carried out during the last 25 years and of
whose findings I have given (and shall continue to give) a detailed
account in other publications.¹