Without quite realising it, many of us are masochists..
The word derives, somewhat unfairly for him and his family, from the Austrian 19th century
aristocrat and writer, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. As a young man, Leopold made a conventional
marriage to a fellow member of the nobility, Aurora von Rümelin, but he swiftly discovered
that his sexual tastes could not be accommodated within the relationship. When he was contacted
by an admiring reader, a Baroness Fanny Pistor, under the ostensible excuse of seeking help
with her writing style, he was able to discover a whole new side to his sexual identity. What
he wanted most of all was that Fanny would dress in a grand and imperious-looking fur
coat, flog him, dominate him and treat him with haughty cruelty. He wanted Fanny to call
him ‘Gregor’, at that time a popular servant’s name - and when they travelled, despite being
far wealthier than her, insisted on being forced to sit in third class while she took
her place in first. Leopold’s proclivities, which he wrote up in a lightly disguised novella
called Venus in Furs, caught the interests of the Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing,
who (despite Leopold’s family’s protestations) included them in his landmark compendium of
kinks, Psychopathology of Sex published in 1890 - which introduced the world to the term
‘masochist’: a person sexually aroused by being on the receiving end of pain.
We now understand a sexual masochist as somebody who might want to be called obscenities, have
their hair pulled or their skin scratched or ordered to describe themselves in highly
derogatory and humiliating terms - albeit, it must be stressed, with explicit consent,
for anything else would be merely abusive.
The mystery is why this could prove so appealing and at points so necessary - to which psychotherapy
has a powerful answer. For the masochist, cruel treatment in sex play is experienced,
first and foremost, as a relief - a relief from the inauthenticity and alienating sentimentality
that can otherwise flow from being treated with generous respect. Masochists tend not
to think too highly of themselves; if others insist on handling them with kid gloves, they
cannot feel seen and understood. It only starts to seem properly real and hence properly exciting
when a special partner spots the very deep secret about them: that they are (at least
for a time and in a certain way) a stupid idiot who deserves a severe beating.
Though the phenomenon of masochism began with, and has remained most fully connected up to
sex, it exists no less powerfully in the emotional realm. There may indeed be many more emotional
masochists at large than there are sexual ones. As with sexual masochism, emotional
masochism is rooted in self-suspicion. Emotional masochists do not deep down feel as if they
are entirely loveable people worthy of careful appreciation and kindness. If someone treats
them well in love, an emotional masochist would soon enough need to dismiss them as
needy and deluded. Why - after all - would anyone feel better about them than they feel
about themselves?
In order to stop being an emotional masochist, it is vital to start to imagine that one might
be one; to start to see - perhaps for the first time - the ways in which one is engaged
in self-sabotage and has made an unconscious commitment to loneliness and frustration.
The task is also to see that the origins of all this lie, as ever, in early life, where
the masochist is liable to have relied on the affections of a parental figure who exhibited,
alongside love, a high degree of cruelty, neglect or violence - leading the child to
a conviction that their destiny must lie in suffering rather than fulfilment.
The most relevant difference between sexual and emotional masochism is that the former
activity will, in the right circumstances, be a lot of fun, whereas the latter one is
never anything other than slow bitter hell. We owe it to ourselves to start to see the
myriad of ways in which we may for far too long have been holding ourselves back from
healthy relationships, not out of any kink or necessity, just because our past has unfairly
imbued us with a sense that unfeeling treatment is all we deserve.