The Economic Problem of Masochism

Freud's 1924 paper asks how masochism can exist at all if mental life is ruled by the pleasure principle: if pain and unpleasure can become aims rather than warnings, the guardian of mental life seems paralysed. He first revises the position of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which had equated the pleasure principle with the Nirvana principle, the tendency, after Fechner and in Barbara Low's term, to reduce excitation to zero. Because there are pleasurable tensions and unpleasurable relaxations, pleasure and unpleasure cannot depend on the quantity of tension alone but on some qualitative factor, perhaps rhythm. He therefore sets out a series: the Nirvana principle expresses the death drive, the pleasure principle is its modification by the libido, and the reality principle a further modification due to the external world. Freud then distinguishes three forms of masochism. Erotogenic masochism, pleasure in pain, underlies the other two. Feminine masochism, described from the fantasies of masochistic men, casts the subject as a helpless, naughty child and, more deeply, in characteristically female situations: being castrated, copulated with or giving birth. Moral masochism is a norm of conduct. Erotogenic masochism rests on libidinal co-excitation and on the fate of the death drive: the libido diverts much of it outward as the destructive drive, part of which serves sexuality as sadism, while the portion that stays inside, libidinally bound, is primary masochism; sadism turned back on the self adds a secondary masochism. Erotogenic masochism takes on the guise of each libidinal phase, from the fear of being eaten to the wish to be beaten by the father. Moral masochism has loosened its tie to sexuality: the suffering itself matters, not who inflicts it. Freud finds it in the negative therapeutic reaction and the unconscious sense of guilt, which he proposes to call a need for punishment. He distinguishes the heightened sadism of the super-ego, usually conscious, from the masochism of the ego, which stays hidden and seeks punishment from the super-ego or from fate. Since the super-ego arose through the desexualisation of the Oedipus complex, moral masochism resexualises morality and revives the complex, tempting the subject to act against their own interests. Freud closes by observing that the cultural suppression of aggression strengthens conscience, and that even self-destruction does not take place without libidinal satisfaction.