All infants have a “repertoire” of common self-hurtful or discomforting mishaps, such as losing their balance in the chair and falling “slow motion” to one side; or missing their mouth with a spoonful and landing the stuff in the eye, ear, or chin; or misjudging a reach for something and falling forward on their face; or miscalculating the trajectory of an object they are bringing toward their face and bumping it against their forehead. Many of these misoccurrences are in fact funny in the way that slapstick is funny, and most caregivers may laugh (if there is no real injury) and also give some soothing “there-there” behaviors.
What is unusual about this group of mothers is that only when one of these mishaps befalls the infant do they come alive. Only when inspired by the “funny” circumstances of the infant’s discomfort does the mother perform lively infant-elicited social behaviors. At those moments she shifts from her deadpan uninvolvement and becomes an effective social partner. At that point, the infant usually rapidly recovers from his mishap in response to his “transformed” mother, and they then share one of their rare moments of mutually pleasurable and exciting stimulation. The problem of course is that the infant’s main moments of interactive delight and liveliness with his mother are dependent upon and perhaps become associated with an immediately preceding unpleasurable feeling. A more ideal learning paradigm could hardly be devised for acquiring the basis of masochism: pain as the condition and prerequisite for pleasure. (The maternal behavior of these mothers is not without obvious sadism.)16
Stern does not suggest that this is the only route to masochism, but clearly this particular route is in some sense the “fault” of the mother.
Another—more psychoanalytic—idea is that masochistic practices derive from the child’s defiant, sadistic feelings initially directed toward an external object such as a parent, but which have then been redirected inward as a result of identification with the object.17 In this view, masochism is sadism turned inwards. An example would be the little boy who becomes enraged and bites himself instead of the parent when the parent imposes some restriction.18
Another approach focuses on the individual’s need to control the people who administer pain. Irving Bieber describes a three-and-a-half-year-old girl who attempted to control her mother’s punishing behavior by punishing herself:
During the preceding year, whenever one parent, especially the mother, punished the girl physically, the child would inflict or threaten to inflict self-injury. She would strike her hands or head on solid objects with sufficient force to produce hematomata; or she would burn her hand on a radiator, or over an open gas flame if she could get to it. By these maneuvers she was largely successful in preventing physical punishment.19
To be more precise: she was successful in preventing punishment by the parent, for she did nonetheless punish herself. She gained a measure of control over the situation by taking that control away from the parent. Her masochistic actions constituted a narcissistic assertion, in effect: “I did it.” Control requires a self who controls.
Related to control is the notion of mastery. Otto Fenichel, for example, discusses “repetitions of traumatic events for the purpose of achieving a belated mastery.”20 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud describes a little boy who was trying to overcome the anxiety of being separated from his mother. The boy developed a game in which he threw objects away and then, with great pleasure, “found” them again. The game was repeated again and again. The apparently compulsive nature of the play led Freud to his concept of the repetition compulsion (“Wiederholungszwang”).21 Not all such repetition is necessarily masochistic, although most analysts agree that masochistic practices do tend to be repetitive in nature.
According to Edmund Bergler, the future masochist initially masters the painful aspects of the pre-Oedipal situation by “sugarcoating” them, that is, by reversing their real significance: “No one frustrated me against my wishes; I frustrated myself because I like it.”22 Again, the shift of control is away from an outside agent to the asserting self. This shift is based on an illusion, of course, for it would never have had to take place if the self were really in control. But it does give the developing child a means to reduce anxiety, as well as a potential source of pleasure. The child actively tries to obtain pleasure, even if the conditions are inappropriate and success is unlikely.23 As Cooper puts it: “the infant claims as its own, and endows with as much pleasure as possible, whatever is familiar, whether painful experiences or unempathic mothers.”24
Masochistic behavior in adults is not always obvious to the outside observer. It may even appear as a normal striving for goals. But a little free association on the couch reveals what is going on, at least to the attentive analyst. Here is one of the numerous clinical examples offered by Bergler:
A young man had developed an amorous attachment for a girl outside his financial and social sphere, and was very conscious of the obstacles. He constantly reiterated the hopelessness of the situation and stated that the inevitable day must come when the family would convince the girl to give him up. One evening the girl told him that an old friend of hers was going to be in town shortly and asked him whether he would object to her seeing him. This trial balloon, testing his “notorious” jealousy, was immediately used by the young man for a violent scene, with which he unconsciously hastened the inevitable end.25
The young man, in effect, planned the unhappy ending of an affair that might actually have turned out well (or might have turned out well if a different girl had been chosen). Other psychoanalysts have observed other kinds of pathological infatuation and masochistic patterns of falling in love. Otto Kernberg, for example, describes patients who receive “narcissistic gratification and fulfillment in the enslavement to an unavailable object.”26 The gratification is narcissistic in the sense that the patient is rewarded with an implicit feeling of grandiosity or moral superiority over the rejecting object. In effect: “I am the greatest sufferer of the world.”27
This is also a somewhat exhibitionistic (Reik would say “demonstrative”) idea. The masochist is always posturing. Psychoanalysts have noted the theatricality of masochism, the masochist’s need for a “public” of some sort. It is unusual for a masochistic act to take place without a witness, at least an imaginary witness. In the deepest layers of the masochist’s psyche this witness is always the pre-Oedipal mother.
In the immediate clinical situation, however, the witness is the therapist. Masochists love to perform self-destructive acts in the presence of the person who is trying to prevent them from performing such acts. One of Bergler’s patients, a depressed, unemployed woman of means who regarded working women as “silly slaves,” consistently showed up late for her psychoanalytic sessions. Yet she was always disappointed that the analyst could not devote more time to her. Sometimes she was so late that only five minutes of the session remained, yet she insisted on having a full session of treatment. She could not understand that the doctor had to send her away, even though she knew another patient was waiting. She perceived the doctor as an unjust tyrant, when in fact she was punishing herself. She was also incapable of making any connection between her feelings about the analyst and her hatred of her mother, whom she regarded as some kind of monster.28