Sadomasochism in Everyday Life

During the fall of 2018 I was on sabbatical and set aside plans to finish my book on Freud, and instead wrote what became Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, published the following year. 

Freud still featured in that unexpected book in important ways. I made the case for why Freud's theory of moral masochism was very helpful in explaining some of the continued cringe-making deference, indeed submission and subservience, to the "Holy Father" and pope of Rome and to all others bearing the title "Father" in the Catholic Church. Such submission is not a small factor in seeking to understand how and why this crisis of sexual abuse has gone on for so long and been so widespread across every continent on earth. 

Freud's 1924 essay "The Economic Problem of Masochism" was very helpful here, along with his other, better known works. That essay is available in this very rich collection: Essential Papers on Masochism. 

Since reading that book, and writing my own, I have had on my list of things to return to and investigate in more depth the topic of sadomasochism. Part of this is driven by clinical work with sexual offenders. 

But part of this is also driven by trying to understand certain dynamics within contemporary America, including contemporary American Christianity in its reactionary and "conservative" guises where the levels of cruelty have been revealed in the past few years in ways I still find astonishing both in number and degree. I am far from finished thinking through all these issues so I will say no more about them here.

Instead the purpose of this note is to draw your attention to a book I just finished this week which is very much worth your time if you are interested in these issues whether to understand your own life, or the life of your patients, or of parts of our culture, or perhaps all three. 

Before doing so, however, let me draw your attention very briefly to two other works I have found useful, and then a longer note about a third book in particular. 

The first book is one that R.A. Glick and D.I Meyers edited: Masochism: Current Psychoanalytic Perspectives, which was first published in 1988 and has a number of useful and insightful chapters by such well-known figures as Otto Kernberg and Roy Schafer. 

The second book is also an edited collection: The Clinical Problem of Masochism, eds. D. Holtzman and N. Kulish (Jason Aronson/Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). This work contains chapters again by Kernberg, alongside others such as Glen Gabbard, Stanley Coen, Harold Blum, and others. 

The book I want to focus on now has been published for nearly a quarter-century now, so some of its cultural references are a bit dated, but the overall discussion and analysis stands up very well indeed to the passage of time. The book is by a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in New York, John Munder Ross, and was published in 1997 by Simon & Schuster as The Sadomasochism of Everyday Life: Why We Hurt Ourselves--and Others--and How to Stop.

The sub-title and the fact of being brought out by a commercial publisher both suggest a certain "self-helpish" nature to the book, but the author, to his credit, largely steers clear of that. As author he's more a sober clinician than a gushing guru bidding for a spot on Oprah, and we can be thankful for that. At the same time, however, he manages to write as a clinician in a way that makes abundant use of examples from modern culture and describes them in ways those with little clinical or psychoanalytic background could easily grasp. 

Before diving into Ross, I went back to Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and he does not equivocate in there when he argues that "the tendency to cause pain to the sexual object and its opposite, [is] the most frequent and most significant of all the perversions." And a little further on in this section he notes reassuringly that "sadism can be readily demonstrable in the normal individual" not least by looking at the forms of its "displacement" through aggression. And masochism, too, is equally widely to be found: "Masochism is nothing but a continuation of sadism directed against one's own person." (These views, of course, would be modified by some of Freud's later works, including the essay mentioned above, but the general point still stands in my view.) 

This is clearly where Ross picks up, too, as when, on the first page, he claims that "Scratch the most normal surface and you will find a little fundamental erotic sadomasochism in just about everybody" (p.11). Before we all run furiously to issue disavowals of this, note that Ross uses terms in the same way as Freud: "erotic," like "libidinal," is not the same thing as "sexual" and does not necessarily entail "genital activity." The former terms are used much more diffusely, and Ross gives examples that reassure us of this: the scab we were fascinated with picking as a child, or the neck-craning we do as adults at the scene of a motor wreck on the highway. Pain and suffering, both our own and that of others, often elicits a certain frisson in us, a soupçon of Schadenfreude if you will, however much admitting so is uncomfortable to us. But admitting so does not thereby entail copping to all of us having bondage dungeons in our basements! Ross's title here is important: everyday life. Dungeons are still a little outré for most of us!

Ross then brings to our attention people who, knowing what they are doing, and knowing the need to change, still engage in self-sabotage. In dramatic and large terms we know such people as, e.g., alcoholics who have lost jobs, children, marriages, even housing. But in smaller and more everyday terms, whom does he not describe? Which of us has not done this a little bit ourselves, and probably as recently as, oh, this week? Self-sabotage seems very much to be an everyday and a universal phenomenon. (It could have been something as banal as skipping on your workout this morning even though you know you need it after scarfing that entire bag of chips last night watching that old horror flick that always gives you nightmares and leaves you feeling anxious and fatigued the next day.)

Work with a patient once brought me back to Freud's little-known 1916 essay "Those Wrecked by Success" as a means of helping to understand how and why it is a person in the prime of life, who has achieved very widespread success and recognition, would descend into a fit of self-destruction. Ross also avers to this essay, which deserves more attention than it seems to have gotten.

Since the pandemic started, and more recently as it appeared to be winding down, how many stories have we been bombarded with about workers not returning? Restaurants are notoriously desperate for staff, truck-haulage companies as well, daycare institutions across the country, and just this morning a local story about 70 unfilled positions in the Indiana State Police after a rash of retirements and resignations. Everyone rightly focuses on the low wages in many of these occupations but in these and many (most?) other occupations, how much attention have we given to the power structures and their abuses? If, writing in 1997, Ross could claim this, it is surely a fortiori applicable today: "Nowhere in daily life is sadomasochism more constantly in evidence than in the institutions that constitute the workplace" (p.44). He expands on this a little later, noting that "surreptitious sadomasochism is to be found everywhere in the life of ordinary individuals and the institutions that organize their social lives" (p.47). 

Overt sadists are rare; so too masochists. Ross draws our attention to how often such phenomena are masked and only manifest clinically in compromise formations, therapeutic enactments, and of course the transference. For some particularly recondite sadomasochistic dynamics, I would follow Nina Coltart's lead and pay attention to whatever images, nicknames, or reveries thrown up in the counter-transference.

Much of sadomasochism, he says later in the book, must be seen as "obeying two basic principles of mental functioning: 'overdetermination' and 'multiple function.' In other words, it has many causes and, once it is in place, serves many ends" (p.160). Some of these manifestations and causes--and here Ross avers to the famous "third ear" of Reik--have to be listened and watched for in particular ways. 

Sadism and masochism may once have played a useful role in the child's development (Ross is familiar with the work of Klein and Winnicott in particular, and cites them later in the book), but he recognizes how "maladaptive" (96) such things usually become later in life. One manifestation in adulthood may be the lack of self-love: "Sadomasochists...lack the basic self-self with which to withstand the fact of their own repugnant but naturally ordained desires" (102). 

The reference here to self-love indicates that Ross is also familiar with, and occasionally quotes from, Heinz Kohut. I have not read as much Kohut as I feel I should, but Charles Strozier's biography is lovely and a worthy introduction to Kohut's life. (I suppose I should confess a bias here in that Strozier has been kind and helpful to me on a number of occasions in sending me drafts of stuff he was working on, and reviewing an article I was working on. It was through Strozier, moreover, that I was introduced to the enormously valuable work of Vamik Volkan.)

When I was on my fellowship at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute in 2018-2019, we did devote a day to Kohut and our teacher was very helpful in breaking down some of the recondite terminology and opaque jargon that Kohut seems to have unhelpfully delighted in. 

In addition to Kohut and the others, Ross also rightly draws on the work of Robert Stoller, to whom I was first introduced a few years back by the great Adam Phillips, from whom I have learned so much. Stoller's book Perversion: the Erotic Form of Hatred is one of the most insightful things I have read in this whole area. For Stoller many manifestations of masochism and sadism are "reparative" attempts by the adult self to turn childhood traumas into triumphs. 

Later in the book, Ross returns to Freud's views on moral masochism, and claims that "since neurosis is inevitable and universal, so, too, is moral masochism" (p.152). Here Ross links this back to one of Freud's last works, Civilization and its Discontents, suggesting that in some ways the price of civilized order is that we all must tolerate a certain degree of moral masochism. 

Moral masochism preoccupies the last two chapters of Ross' book. Chapter 9 ("Sadomasochism in the Treatment Setting: the Cure") argues that "the universality of moral masochism makes almost every course of treatment harder and longer than might otherwise be the case" (p. 185). Here, of course, our attention is drawn to negative therapeutic reactions, retrenchment, and so-called resistance. Here we are confronted, in some patients, with a high enough level of masochistic guilt that they keep themselves from betting better. (As Winnicott famously observed, "health is ever so much more difficult to deal with than disease.")

The therapeutic challenges are many, and Ross does not shy away from discussing them. He notes that people who punish themselves and are unable to allow themselves to get better do so because such reactions have many "internal and external masters" whose job is always to seek to maintain "the social status quo" (187). Thus for some, they really do prefer to remain in "an oppressive but contained and secure" environment of their own making--however painful it is to them and others. 

For the therapist inclined here, when faced with such patients, to resort to moral exhortation to grow past their masochistic masters, Ross rightly cautions us in no uncertain terms that 

The very act of offering advice runs counter to the ingenuity of psychoanalytic method [that]...is devised to draw out & then call into question the omniscience & omnipotence attributed to the practitioner by the patient & to analyze the sources of these illusions (191).

In saying this, Ross is echoing and in fact anticipating Adam Phillips, not least in the latter's recent book The Cure for Psychoanalysis (but see also his Terrors and Experts). 

What then, can the clinician, tempted to despair, actually do? Ross offers two things worth considering. The first has very strong echoes of Winnicott: "What is most significant for the resolution of masochistic conflicts...is the psychoanalyst's growing emphasis on the patient's capacity to be alone and to tolerate tension and uncertainty" (192). In increasing such an emphasis, the therapist has to find ways of gently but firmly thwarting the patient's desire for a panacea, for a clear-cut "fix" to all their problems. 

An additional way forward is here suggested by Ross: "in order to be free or independent, one must mourn one's past, refrain from taking the path of least resistance, and constantly act to impose one's will on oneself" (193). In saying this, Ross is rightly pointing out that the work rests on the patient. Here he reminds me of that constant refrain supervisors have given down through the ages: do not work harder than your patient. Ross makes this explicit thus when addressing the reader directly at the very end of his book The Sadomasochism of Everyday Life: Why We Hurt Ourselves -- and Others -- and How to Stop: "the responsibility for making changes is your own, and in a sense nobody changes anybody else's mind or heart" (220).