their teeth in his white breast,—she and her dogs, the rivals, Oxus and Sphynx,—they on the right side, she on the left; and as I approached blood dripped from her hands and mouth.” And later, when Penthesilea becomes satiated: “Did I kiss him to death? No. Did I not kiss him? Torn in pieces? Then it was a mistake; kissing rhymes with biting, and one who loves with the whole heart might easily mistake the one for the other.”[1]
2. The Association of Passively Endured Cruelty and Violence, with Lust—Masochism.[2]—Masochism is the opposite of sadism. While the latter is the desire to cause pain and use force, the former is the wish to suffer pain and be subjected to force.
By masochism I understand a peculiar perversion of the psychical vita sexualis, 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 by a master,—humiliated and abused. This idea is colored by lustful feeling; the individual affected lives in fancies, in which he creates situations of this kind, and often attempts to realize them. By this perversion his sexual instinct is not infrequently made more or less insensible to the normal stimulus of the opposite sex,—incapable of a normal vita sexualis,—psychically impotent. But this psychical impotence does not in any way depend upon a horror sexus alterius, but upon the fact that this perverse instinct finds an adequate satisfaction differing from the normal,—in woman, to be sure, but not in coitus.
But cases also occur, in which, with the perverse impulse, there is also sensibility, in a measure, to normal stimuli, and intercourse under normal conditions takes place. In other cases the impotence is not purely psychical, but physical, i.e., spinal; for this perversion, like almost all other perversions of the sexual instinct, is developed only on the basis of a psycho-
- ↑ In the latest literature we find the matter treated, but particularly in Sacher-Masoch’s novels, which are hereafter to be alluded to, and in Ernest von Wildenbruch’s “Brunhilde,” Rachilde’s “La Marquise de Sade,” etc.
- ↑ So named from the writer, Sacher-Masoch, whose romances and novels have as their particular object the description of this perversion.
