Sadomasochism and Pseudo-Christian Culture

Since writing, in 2018, and publishing, in 2019, my book on the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, I have been increasingly convinced of the utility of an analysis of sadomasochistic dynamics to understanding certain aspects of Christian life and practice, not least by so-called American Christians who have perversely and gleefully submitted themselves to the sadism of the present presidential regime which all right-thinking and truly devout people hope will come to an end in a few weeks. 

Such an application of psychodynamic theories of sadomasochism has not been widely or skillfully done before as far as I can tell. (I am prescinding here from discussions of S&M sexual practices, which have garnered a lot of often tawdry attention over the last decade in a frequently sensationalistic way which is very tiresome.) As our author says, "our culture is not only immensely infantile, but also completely blind to sadomasochism in the adult world" (p.12). I was therefore especially interested in his recent book for its attempt to analyze sadomasochism while situating the discussion in a wider context much informed by clinical practice. The result is a fascinating, if often uneven, book by the English psychologist and psychoanalyst J.F. Miller, The Triumphant Victim: A Psychoanalytical Perspective on Sadomasochism and Perverse Thinking (Routledge, 2013), 275pp. What follows are some notes I have drawn from this book which I will probably make use of in a chapter for my own book (if it ever gets done) on Freud and Christianity. 

The author begins by noting that a baby is born out of the physical womb but into the mental-emotional womb of the mother. As the infant develops the mother is more and more internalized and the infant more and more attached for a time. Here, of course, as Winnicott first recognized and Bowlby and others picked up and elaborated, there is a delicate balance: the mother who is too receptive or not receptive/attached enough to a baby can do damage in either way. 

As the child develops her instincts of contrariness and aggression, these actually help her gradually to dissolve the bonds of maternal attachment. Once again this must proceed carefully. If the dissolution is forced upon the child too soon for whatever reason, then very likely an unhealthy and ultimately maladaptive form of precocity of mind will often result. This was first brilliantly described in D.W. Winnicott's fascinating 1949 essay "Mind and its Relation to the Psyche-Soma."

Neither in Winnicott nor in any other developmental scheme is any notion of sadomasochism usually to be found. As Miller says, it has no place in most developmental schemes, but instead seems to be "an emotional mutation where the passive and aggressive aspects of normal development become twisted into a pathological shape," not unlike a cancer. The reasons for this will vary widely.  

Early in the book, Miller goes back to Freud's "A Child is Being Beaten," which I also drew on in my recent book. The point of that clinical paper is to reveal some of the underlyind dynamics involved in fantasizing about someone else being beaten who can bear the fantasies and desires of the one doing the beating: this, of course, takes us straight to Melanie Klein's crucial insight of projective identification. As Miller puts it, this is "the avoidance of an unwanted emotional experience by projecting oneself into the fantasy of being someone or something else" (p.4). 

If, for whatever reason, the mother is unavailable or insufficient, the baby may well (this was Bion's point) develop illusions of the good enough mother. "Crucially, the main thing that happens here is that the baby learns not to be spontaneously demanding but to behave in a way that brings out the best of the mother, so to speak" (p.5). In other words, what we have here is an aboriginal masochistic submission by the child to the painful inadequacies of the mother. Here some of the earliest seeds of sadomasochistic dynamics may be found. 

Miller illustrates this development with the example of a 3-year-old child who is fiercely independent and rebellious. One night, the tired mother grabbed the child roughly in an angry moment, but the child eludes her grasp and then falls, slightly injuring her head. Immediately the mother switches to being soothing, comforting, compassionate, all anger having fled. In some children this can create the realization that submitting to a bit of pain brings shockingly, sometimes thrillingly strong emotional rewards. As the child grows, she learns how to manipulate situations to appear a victim. This, Miller says, can happen in otherwise healthy families--it is not necessarily nefarious or even indicative of major pathology. But in situations where there is serious psychopathology, then the SM dynamics can be much worse, even leading to what he openly calls "evil."

There is much clinical material in the book of interest, along with a lot of social critique, much of which I found surprisingly waspish, sometimes bordering on the reactionary. Let us skip ahead to some of the later chapters that treat explicitly of religion. 

Miller argues along very similar lines to what I did in my book on the Catholic Church's abuse crisis and its often pathological paternal dynamics. Thus he says:

The question of religion is also very pertinent here. When someone has experienced serious, emotional deprivation in childhood, it is common for them to look for some kind of maternal experience of a collective or group variety. Organised religion, such as the Christian church, particularly lends itself to this, as is reflected in the concept of 'Mother Church' where the priests are called 'Father' and assume a parental attitude towards the congregation (p.44). 

Much later in the book he returns to this, noting that "In fact, one of the most important issues in the understanding of sadomasochism involves a concept that is more associated with religion than psychology, and that is pride. We need to be clear here, at the outset, that we are referring to pride as the problem of arrogance or superiority" (p.191), and such feelings are often manifested by those motivated by an adamantine sense of superiority coming from the illusion of possessing absolute (and ostensibly divinely revealed) truth. 

My respect for Miller increased yet further when he realized, and explicitly comments on, the fact that sadomasochistic dynamics have existed in psychoanalytic institutes and their rivalries and internal power politics. He also flatly admits--and here openly contradicts Freud--that "In fact, it is difficult to conceive of psychoanalysis being other than religious in the deepest, truest sense of the religious being concerned with ethics, value systems, and their place in healthy emotional development" (p.147). 

A final note made toward the end of the book confirms what is well known among clinicians: the dangers, and reality, of treatment collapse are real. Such failure can happen for several reasons, but Miller suggests that underlying it all much of the time will be an at least mild form of masochism: "It is, to some extent, always the case that people prefer to go on having their problems more comfortably rather than to solve them" (p.259). 

As time allows, I hope to offer some thoughts on at least one other book in my pile: Battling the Life and Death Forces of Sadomasochism: Clinical Perspectives by Harriet I Basseches, Paula Lisette Ellman, and Nancy R Goodman (Routledge, 2018), 318pp.