If the power which threatens the masochist ultimately emanates from the “parental couple,” then the ontogenetic origin of masochism must lie in childhood. As Loewenstein says, “masochism seems to be the weapon of the weak—i.e., of every child—faced with the danger of human aggression.”5
Clinical Developments since Freud
Although Freud speaks of the “parental couple” as the ultimate source of any internal need for suffering and punishment, he more often than not specifies the father as the model for the psyche’s internal disciplinarian (superego, conscience), and in his article on Dostoevsky he declares outright that “Fate is, in the last resort, only a later projection of the Father.”6 Freud also tends to focus on the Oedipal dimension of internal needs for suffering (e.g., “through moral masochism morality becomes sexualized once more, the Oedipus complex is revived and the way is open for a regression from morality to the Oedipus complex”).7
These two tendencies of Freud’s are, in my opinion and in the opinion of many other modern psychoanalysts and psychologists, mistaken. The mother has a crucial role to play in the origination of the child’s masochistic tendencies, and she plays her role specifically in the pre-Oedipal period. These considerations do not exclude, but complement the later role of the father and of Oedipal dynamics.
The importance of the mother in early development has been emphasized in many post-Freudian theories of human ontogeny. The child begins its existence in a sort of symbiosis with the mother. There follows what some psychoanalysts term a separation-individuation process, which takes place very roughly from about the fourth to the thirty-sixth month of age. The child acquires the fundamentals of its “mother tongue” specifically in the context of its early relationship with the mother. It is in this context that the child also learns the elementary moves of give and take required for all subsequent reciprocal interaction with persons. The child has its first erotic experiences in the pre-Oedipal situation. And so on. In many respects the mother-child dyad is the prototype of all significant social interaction the child will ever have. There is an enormous literature (not only psychoanalytic) on the fundamental importance of the mother in early child development.8
How does this literature contribute to our understanding of masochistic practices? What role does the pre-Oedipal mother play in the child’s acquisition of masochistic tendencies? The existing theories on pre-Oedipal mother-child relations are very heterogeneous, and they do not always deal with the problem of masochism. But from those which do, it is possible to tease out a thread of common concerns as regards the ontogenetic origin and adult manifestations of masochism.
Many psychoanalysts hold that the adult masochist has suffered some form of deprivation or trauma at the hands of the pre-Oedipal mother. The mother may not have been sensitive enough to the child’s need for milk, she may have been emotionally unresponsive (or responded inappropriately) in dyadic interaction with the child, or she may have physically abused the child. Such a mother has, in a sense, defeated her child, and the child, having had no adequate experience of what it means to be victorious, grows up to be someone who tends to engage in self-defeating behavior. The masochist repeats prior defeats. In effect: “I shall repeat the masochistic wish of being deprived by my mother, by creating or misusing situations in which some substitute of my pre-Oedipal mother-image shall refuse my wishes.”9
Masochism should not be blamed entirely on mothers, however. Life is not easy even for the infant whose mother is doing everything humanly possible to care for it. Anxiety is unavoidable in infancy. Also, some infants may simply be constitutionally incapable of withstanding the treatment they receive from perfectly normal mothers.10 There are defective infants as well as defective mothers. I want to avoid the kind of stigmatization of mothers that resulted from the once-popular term “schizophrenogenic mother.” Psychoanalysts do not always seem to be aware of how much they blame their patients’ mothers.
In any case, it is the psychoanalytic consensus that something went wrong in the masochist’s early interaction with his or her mother—regardless of who was “at fault.” As Kerry Kelly Novick and Jack Novick assert, “the first layer of masochism must be sought in early infancy, in the child’s adaptation to a situation where safety resides only in a painful relationship with the mother.”11
Something may later go wrong in the relationship with the father as well, of course, or with other individuals. But usually masochistic problems originate in interaction with the mother, if only because the mother is usually the child’s primary caretaker—in Russia, as elsewhere—in the crucial early phases of development.
Indeed, by virtue of her uniquely powerful position in the young child’s life, the mother enormously influences all of the child’s subsequent thinking and fantasizing about dominance and submission. The pre-Oedipal mother is the prototypical “master,” the child is the prototypical “slave.” Psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein has written on this topic:
In our first real contests of will, we find ourselves, more often than not, defeated: The defeat is always intimately carnal; and the victor is always female. Through woman’s jurisdiction over child’s passionate body, through her control over what goes into it and what comes out of it, through her right to restrict its movements and invade its orifices, to withhold pleasure or inflict pain until it obeys her wishes, each human being first discovers the peculiarly angry, bittersweet experience of conscious surrender to conscious, determined outside rule.12
When the child—for whatever reason—has this “bittersweet experience” more often than it can bear, then it is in some sense permanently injured. Its sense of itself (as distinct from others), its evaluation of itself (narcissism) is affected. The masochist is, among other things, forever trying to repair old injury to the self.
Only the repair fails. What is more, this failure seems to be planned. The masochist seeks out failure, sometimes even seems to enjoy it. How can this be?
Paradox lies at the heart of masochism. The masochist achieves what Thoedore Reik calls “victory through defeat.”13 Arnold Cooper speaks of “the paradox of pleasure-in-unpleasure.”14 Anita Katz finds it paradoxical that “the masochistic person contradicts himself or herself, speaking and acting against self-strivings and self-fulfillment in a seemingly absurd manner.” A striking clinical example is offered by Katz:
After several years of our work, she [a self-deprecating, self-defeating patient] said: “I want you to be my mother.” When I asked her what that would be like, she startled both of us by beginning to hit herself on her face and head. She screamed, “Do you see what I did? I beat myself when I think of being mothered.”
On another occasion, when the patient was again beating herself, the analyst told her to sit up and stop it. The patient then asked, in complete innocence: “That’s not good for me, is it—beating myself?”15 Masochists can be surprisingly ignorant of the harm they do to themselves.
Various attempts have been made to explain the paradox of masochism. Daniel Stern, in his discussion of the “paradoxical stimulation” offered to infants by relatively unresponsive and neglecting mothers, offers a behaviorist rather than a psychoanalytic model. According to Stern, there is a class of mothers who seem able to reinforce only the self-hurtful behavior of their infants: