The Naturalness of Sado-Masochism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Naturalness of Sado-Masochism is a section in The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. It stresses the normalcy of sadomasochism.
Full text[1]
Although there is nothing new to say on this problem, with all the vast writings that have covered it, I want to again stress the naturalness of these perversions. Sadism and masochism seem like frighteningly technical ideas, secrets about the inner recesses of man only fully revealed to practicing psychoanalysts. Even more than that, they seem like rare and grotesque aberrations of normal human conduct. Both these suppositions are false. Masochism comes naturally to man, as we have seen again and again in these pages. Man is naturally humble, naturally grateful, naturally guilty, naturally transcended, naturally a sufferer; he is small, pitiful, weak, a passive taker who tucks himself naturally in a beyond of superior, awesome, all-embracing power. Sadism likewise is the natural activity of the creature, the drive toward experience, mastery, pleasure, the need to take from the world what it needs in order to increase itself and thrive;— what is more, a human creature who has to forget himself, resolve his own painful inner contradictions. The hyphenated word sado-masochism expresses a natural complementarity of polar opposites: no weakness without intensive focus of power and no use of power without falling back on a secure merger with a larger source of power. Sado-masochism, then, reflects the general human condition, the daily lives of most people. It reflects man living by the nature of the world and his own nature as it has been given to him. Actually, then, it reflects "normal" mental health.
Do we wonder, for example, that rape is on the increase in today's confused world? People feel more and more powerless. How can they express their energies, get things more in balance between overwhelming input and feeble output? Rape gives a feeling of personal power in the ability to cause pain, to totally manipulate and dominate another creature. The autocratic ruler, as Canetti so well observes, gets the ultimate in the experience of domination and control by turning all persons into animals and treating them as chattels. The rapist gets the same kind of satisfaction in what seems a perfectly natural way; there are very few situations in life in which people can get a sense of the perfect appropriateness of their energies: the quickened vitality that comes when we prove that our animal bodies have the requisite power to secure their dominion in this world — or at least a living segment of it.
Have we always been puzzled by how willingly the masochist experiences pain? Well, for one thing pain calls the body to the forefront of experience. It puts the person back into the center of things forcefully as a feeling animal. It is thus a natural complement to sadism. Both are techniques for experiencing forceful self-feeling, now in outer-directed action, now in passive suffering. Both give intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. Furthermore, to experience pain is to "use" it with the possibility of controlling it and triumphing over it. As Irving Bieber— argued in his important paper, the masochist doesn't "want" pain, he wants to be able to identify its source, localize it, and so control it. Masochism is thus a way of taking the anxiety of life and death and the overwhelming terror of existence and congealing them into a small dosage. One then experiences pain from the terrifying power and yet lives through it without experiencing the ultimate threat of annihilation and death. As Zilboorg so penetratingly observed, the sado-masochistic combination is the perfect formula for transmuting the fear of death.— Rank called masochism the "small sacrifice," the "lighter punishment," the "placation" that allows one to avoid the archevil of death. When applied to sexuality, masochism is thus a way of taking suffering and pain, "which in the last analysis are symbols of death," and transmuting them into desired sources of pleasure.— As Henry Hart also observed so well, this is a way of taking self-administered, homeopathic doses; the ego controls total pain, total defeat, and total humiliation by experiencing them in small doses as a sort of vaccination.— From still another point of view, then, we see the fascinating ingenuity of the perversions: the turning of pain, the symbol of death, into ecstasy and the experience of more-life.
But again, the limits of the ingenuity of perversion are obvious. If you fix the terror of life and death magically on one person as the source of pain, you control that terror, but you also overinflate that person. This is a private religion that "makes believe" too much and so humiliates the masochist by placing him in the power of another person. No wonder sado-masochism is ultimately belittling, a hothouse drama of control and transcendence played by pint-sized characters. All heroism is relative to some kind of "beyond"; the question is, which kind? This question reminds us of something we discussed earlier: the problem of too-limited beyonds. From this point of view, perversions are merely a demonstration of the severe limitation of the beyonds one chooses for his drama of heroic apotheosis. The sado-masochist is someone who plays out his drama of heroism vis-a-vis one person only; he is exercising his two ontological motives — Eros and Agape — on the love object alone. On the one hand, he is using that object to expand his sense of his own fullness and power; on the other, giving vent to his need to let go, abandon his will, find peace and fulfillment by a total merger with something beyond him. Romm's patient showed perfectly this shrinkage of a cosmic problem to the single partner:
- In an attempt to relieve his severe tension he struggled between the wish to be a dominant male, aggressive and sadistic toward his wife, and the desire to give up his masculinity, be castrated by his wife and thus return to a state of impotence, passivity and helplessness.—
How easy it would be if we could satisfy the yearnings of the whole human condition safely in the bedroom of our cottage. As Rank put it, we want the partner to be like God, all-powerful to support our desires, and all-embracing to merge our desires into — but this is impossible.
If, then, sado-masochism reflects the human condition, the acting out of our twin ontological motives, we can truly talk about honest masochism, or mature masochism, exactly as Rank did in his unusual discussion in Beyond Psychology.— It was one of Freud's limitations that he could not quite push his thought to this kind of conclusion, even though he brushed it repeatedly. He was so impressed by the intensity, depth, and universality of sadism and masochism that he termed them instincts. He saw truly that these drives went right to the heart of the human creature. But he drew a pessimistic conclusion, lamenting the fact that mankind could not get rid of these drives. Again, he was stuck with his instinct theory, which made him see these drives as remnants of an evolutionary condition and as tied to specific sexual appetites. Rank, who saw more truly, could transform sadism and masochism from clinically negative to humanly positive things. The maturity of masochism, then, would depend on the object toward which it was directed, on how much in possession of himself the mature masochist was. In Rank's view, a person would be neurotic not because he was masochistic but because he was not really submissive, but only wanted to make believe that he was.— Let us dwell on this type of failure briefly, because it sums up the whole problem of mental illness that we have broached.
