Masochistic behavior is often accompanied by feelings of self-righteousness or self-pity. “Poor me,” the patient seems to say, “I am always getting mistreated.” Yet the patient somehow always manages to end up in a situation that results in suffering. The patient wallows in suffering, even while complaining constantly about it.
Such patients become what Bergler calls “injustice collectors.” They go about the world searching for ever-new ways to be “kicked in the jaw.” On the surface they appear to be aggressive, they seem to have a “chip on the shoulder,” but they are only trying to provoke aggression from others by their behavior—and they often succeed.
Many masochists are desperately in need of love. They use suffering to obtain sympathy and love from others. This is evident, for example, in one subtype of what Otto Kernberg calls “depressive-masochistic personality disorder” in which there are “traits reflecting overdependency on support, love, and acceptance from others.” These traits reveal “a tendency to excessive guilt feelings toward others because of unconscious ambivalence toward loved and needed objects, and an excessive reaction of frustration when their expectations are not met.” For these patients the “sense of being rejected and mistreated as a reaction to relatively minor slights may lead them to unconscious behaviors geared to making the objects of their love feel guilty.”29
As Bernhard Berliner puts it, such patients try to “extort love” from others.30 Otto Fenichel speaks of the “accusing, blackmailing tone” of the masochist.31 Or, to use an American slang expression, masochists like to “lay guilt trips” on the people around them, and often suffer (or rather, try to enjoy) rejection as a result.
The love which the masochist ultimately seeks is a mother’s love—often metonymically represented as the pre-Oedipal mother’s breast. One self-pitying, self-deprecating masochist wrote the following in a note to her analyst:
I was about to say that I think I over-love my mother, and am afraid of this, also afraid of her love because there is something disgusting about it. I don’t know why it should be disgusting, but it is… I would say large, flopping breasts come into the picture, over-earthiness.32
To “over-love” the floppy-breasted mother is to need her love too much, and the feeling of disgust in this case is clearly a compensatory reaction (the technical term is reaction formation). Bernhard Berliner says that “the masochist hangs on, so to speak, to a breast which is not there and which he has to repudiate when it could be there, symbolically.”33 Esther Menaker also emphasizes the background of felt oral deprivation by the mother in masochistic behavior:
The normal development of the ego is as directly dependent on getting love from the mother at the earliest infantile level, as is the physical development on getting milk. If mother love on the oral level is absent or insufficient, the individual suffers a psychic trauma which must eventuate in a malformation and malfunction of the ego. The masochistic reaction is one form of an attempt on the part of the ego to deal with this trauma. It sacrifices itself, that is, its own independent development and the sense of its own worth, to sustain the illusion of mother love—an idealized mother image—without which life itself is impossible.34
This idea is illustrated by the case of a masochistic woman patient who was literally deprived of her mother and cared for by a busy uncle for the first four or five months of her life. This masochist certainly had inadequate mothering during the crucial pre-Oedipal period.
An even more graphic example is the dream Dmitrii Karamazov has shortly before his masochistic declaration of guilt (see above, 84). Recall that the mother in the dream is unable to feed her child. Her breasts are dried out, and the child is crying pitifully. Dmitrii is very moved by this. He wants to cry himself. He identifies with the child, he understands how the child must feel, since he himself had been abandoned by his mother when he was three years old. He must feel the child’s own rage against the mother for not providing nourishment. But hostility against the beloved mother is bound to produce guilt, which is to say that the hostility is redirected back against the self. Guilt feeling is, by psychoanalytic definition, an imagined experience of aggression directed against the self: “…the self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient’s own ego.”35
Not for nothing, then, does Dmitrii guiltily beat his own breast after the dream, for his unhappy dream child (i.e., he himself as a child) had raged against the mother’s dried-out breasts. The masochistic declaration of guilt (“of all I am the lowest reptile,” “I need a blow, a blow of sud’ba,” etc.) is this rage, redirected away from the inadequate mother and toward the self.
When later Dmitrii repeatedly says “It’s for that babe I am going to Siberia now,”36 he is rationalizing his guilt feelings, explaining to himself and to those around him why he welcomes the punishment of Siberia. If there weren’t any children deprived of the mother’s breast, there wouldn’t have to be any sought-for Siberia. If mothers were (perceived as) adequate, there wouldn’t be any masochism. Here Dostoevsky achieves an essentially psychoanalytic insight by means of literary images.
Is Masochism Gendered?
As is evident from the variety of clinical examples I have given, both males and females may engage in masochistic practices. It is not clear a priori, then, whether the slave soul of Russia might or might not be a gendered object. There is reason to believe, however, that certain of these practices under certain conditions are more prevalent in one sex than in the other.
Fighting wars, for example, is an arguably masochistic activity practiced almost exclusively by males in all cultures. One may debate what constitutes a reasonable cause for taking the extreme risk of charging an enemy position—the motherland and Stalin, freedom and justice, oil in the Persian Gulf, or whatever—but one cannot doubt that men do these things more often than women do, and that they often die as a result. Perhaps this masochistic aspect of warfare has been neglected because the sadistic aspect is so obvious. The feuding princes of ancient Rus’ understood it quite well, however, for they interpreted death in battle as a deserved punishment. In effect: “I believe I am right; if I am wrong God will punish me.”37
Sexual masochism is also more common among males than females. Morton Hunt found, for example, that nearly twice as many males as females in his sample obtained sexual pleasure from receiving pain.38 Males, incidentally, are also more likely than females to be sexual sadists.39
Curiously, it is almost always male sexual masochists who don the clothes of the opposite sex. This makes sense in light of the fact that women generally have a lower social status than men do.40 If one (whether male or female) needs to be spanked, or bound, or otherwise humiliated in order to achieve orgasm, one may as well choose gender signs that “go” with the occasion (e.g., an apron rather than a jock strap).41
In some nonsexual contexts women appear to be more masochistic than men. Psychotherapists are familiar with a pattern of victimization that many women seem to gravitate toward. As Lynn Chancer observes, if such a pattern did not really exist, it would be difficult to explain the popularity of such self-help titles as Women Who Love Too Much or Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them.42