traced back within physiological limits. These are: the fact (1) that in sexual emotion, to a certain extent, as an accompanying psychical excitation, an impulse may arise to influence the object of desire in every possible way and with the greatest possible intensity, which, in individuals sexually hyperæsthetic, may become an impulse to inflict pain; and the fact (2) that, under pathological conditions, the man’s active rôle of winning woman may become an unlimited desire for subjugation.
Thus masochism and sadism represent perfect counterparts. It is also in harmony with this that the individuals affected with these perversions regard the opposite perversion in the other sex as their ideal, as shown by Case 44 and Case 50, and also by “Rousseau’s Confessions.”
But the contrast of masochism and sadism may also be used to invalidate the assumption that the former has its origin in the reflex effect of passive flagellation; and that all the rest is the product of associations of related ideas, as Binet, in explanation of Rousseau’s case, thinks, and as Rousseau himself believed.
In the active maltreatment forming the object of the sadist’s sexual desire there is, in fact, no irritation of his own sensory nerves by the act of maltreatment; so that there can be no doubt of the purely psychical character of the origin of this perversion. Sadism and masochism; however, are so related to each other, and so correspond in all points with each other, that the one allows, by analogy, a conclusion for the other; and this is alone sufficient to establish the purely psychical character of masochism.
According to the above-detailed contrast of all the elements and phenomena of masochism and sadism, and as a résumé of all observed cases, lust in the infliction of pain and lust in inflicted pain appear but as two different sides of the same psychical process, of which the primary and essential thing is the consciousness of active or passive subjection, in which the combination of cruelty and lustful pleasure has only a secondary psychological significance. Acts of cruelty serve to express this subjection; first, because they are the most extreme means for
