great impression on me. I should like to have faith in a cure, in a logical cure, so to speak, in accordance with the motto: “Tout comprendre c’est tout guérir.” (To understand all is to cure all.)
Of course the word cure is to be taken with some limitation, and there must be a distinction made between general feelings and concrete ideas. The former can never be overcome; they come like a stroke of lightning, are there, and one does not know whence or how.
But this practice of masochism in imagination, by means of concrete, associated ideas, can be avoided, or at least restricted.
Now the thing is changed. I say to myself: What! you busy your mind with things which not only the æsthetic sense of others, but also your own, disapproves? You regard that as beautiful and desirable which, in your own judgment, is at once ugly, coarse, silly, and impossible? You long for a situation which in reality you can never obtain? This opposing idea has an immediate inhibitory and undeceiving effect, and takes the edge off the fancy. Too, since reading the “New Investigations” (early this year), I have actually not reveled in my fancy once, though the masochistic tendency has occurred with regularity.
I must also confess that, in spite of its marked pathological character, masochism is not only incapable of destroying my pleasure in life, but it does not in the least affect my outward life. When not in a masochistic state, as far as feeling and action are concerned, I am a perfectly normal man. During the activity of the masochistic tendencies there is, of course, a great revolution in my feeling, but my outward manner of life suffers no change; I have a calling that makes it necessary for me to move much in public, and I pursue it in the masochistic condition as well as ever.The author of the foregoing lines also sends me the following notes:—
