The “no” of the two-year-old toddler helps him define himself, even when it involves getting into trouble. Unpleasure is experienced as a necessary accompaniment or condition for the pleasure in and drive for separateness and individuation. The adult masochist’s “I will, too, be self-destructive and you can’t stop me” asserts his control, but also defines him as an independent agent, separate, autonomous, and individuated. “I am the sufferer” defines his identity, though a negative one.59
“As difficult as this may be for the therapist,” says Meyers, “it may be necessary for the patient to fail on his own, before he can give up this masochistic stance without fear of merger.”60
This “fear of merger,” which derives from an insufficient sense of separateness and individuality, is important in certain forms of masochism. It is as if the masochist does not have a separate identity unless he or she is suffering: Doleo ergo sum, I suffer, therefore I am—to quote a Cartesian neologism that has appeared more than once in the psychological literature on masochism.61
An insufficient sense of individual identity is as much the masochist’s narcissistic problem as is low self-esteem. When the masochistic act is designed to show that “J am in control, not someone else” (see above, 98), then there is an implicit danger that the “I” might be confused with the “someone else.” Similarly, when the masochistic act is aimed at mastery of a previous trauma (above, 98), the implication is that the trauma has threatened the very being of the masochist. The boundaries of the self who masters are clearer than those of the self who is traumatized.
Daniel Kriegman and Malcolm Slavin (1989) suggest that repetitively self-defeating behavior in the clinical situation is aimed at the completion of a previously interrupted construction of the self. In this Darwinian view the self is an “organ” which has been produced by natural selection, and which reflects the inclusive genetic interests of the individual.
Robert Stolorow believes that “masochistic activities, as one of their multiple functions, may serve as abortive efforts to restore, repair, buttress and sustain a self-representation that had been damaged and rendered precarious by injurious experiences during the early pre-oedipal era, when the self-representation is developmentally most vulnerable.”62 To illustrate this thesis, Stolorow points out that some masochists are relieved of anxiety when they experience skin contact with a beloved person, or when their skin is stimulated in some unusual way: “the structurally deficient masochist… seeks erotic stimulation and warming of the skin surface, because it highlights the outlines of his precarious body image and restores his sense of self-cohesion.”63 Stolorow argues that the well-known exhibitionistic tendencies of masochists (e.g., concern with martyrdom) also serve to shore up a failing self-image. Some masochists feel they do not even exist unless they are observed.
Roy Baumeister has offered a theory of (erotogenic) masochism that seems to be the opposite of Stolorow’s. According to Baumeister, masochistic practices do not facilitate cohesion of the self, but provide an avenue of escape from it:
Masochism may appeal to psychologically normal people as a way of escaping from the self. That is, masochism divests the person of awareness of self in high-level, symbolic, meaningful terms, extending into the past and future. In its place, masochism focuses awareness on the self at extremely low levels; as a physical entity existing in the immediate present, passively experiencing sensations and simple movements. Masochism deconstructs the self, providing escape from identity into body.64
If one needs to escape from the self, however, there must be a problem with that self. It does not naturally cohere, it would fall apart without periodic relief of some kind (Baumeister focuses on powerful politicians and responsible corporate executives who periodically come to a dominator or a dominatrix for a beating). I suspect, moreover, that the “elaborate self-concept” which needs to be “deconstructed” in the scene of humiliation is originally formed in early interaction with the mother, although Baumeister himself says almost nothing about ontogeny. At least something went wrong in the formation of the masochist’s self.65
Before Baumeister, some psychoanalysts had also viewed masochism as an attempt to escape from the self. Karen Horney is an example. She made it clear that the self to be escaped from is highly problematicaclass="underline" “The obtaining of satisfaction by submersion in misery is an expression of the general principle of finding satisfaction by losing the self in something greater, by dissolving the individuality, by getting rid of the self with its doubts, conflicts, pains, limitations and isolation.”66
Another example is Erich Fromm. In his important treatise Escape from Freedom (1965 [1941]), written in response to the rise of mass fascism in Germany, Fromm expresses the idea that individual responsibility and freedom are frightening. The self is insignificant and alone in the world. Consequently there is an inclination to “escape” from or “forget” the self, to fall into submissive dependence on some larger, controlling social entity such as a mass religious or ideological movement (e.g., Calvinism, Nazism). One component of this process is masochistic in nature. “Escape” from the self is very likely to be self-destructive.67
It should be clear by now that, within the psychoanalytic field, there are diverse and sometimes contradictory views on the relationship of masochism to the self. The major contradiction has to do with the direction the masochist seems to be moving with respect to the pre-Oedipal mother. Some analysts (e.g., Meyers, Stolorow) see masochistic behavior as an attempt to achieve a separate identity or self-definition with respect to an external, maternally significant reality. Others (e.g., Asch) view masochism as a way not to be separated from the engulfing, pre-Oedipal mother, as even a means of achieving merger with her. The “escape” theories seem to fit the latter category, as they involve submersion in a larger other that is implicitly maternal (e.g., the highly idealized and ideologized group).
Perhaps these two apparently conflicting views can be resolved by positing two different grades of masochism, or two different extremes of the masochistic spectrum (much as manic-depressive illness is now regarded as a unitary phenomenon in the psychiatric community). At one extreme the self revives the old delusion of independence from the pre-Oedipal mother, at the other extreme it entertains the even older delusion of fusion with her.
The closest thing to a synthesis of these extremes that I have been able to find in the psychoanalytic literature is made by Lane, Hull, and Foehrenbach. Speaking of behavioral negativity generally (which includes masochism), these authors say: “One of the most important functions of negativity in later life is to simultaneously express and defend against unconscious symbiotic longings, wishes to return to the earliest relationship with the mother, a relationship that bore the stamp of negativity.”68 Adducing specific examples such as self-mutilation and headbanging, Lane et al. state: “These actions… may represent unconscious enactments of a primitive fantasy of merging with the destructive mother. The ensuing physical sensations restabilize the patient’s uncertain body image and provide assurance against the underlying fantasy.”69 In other words, the masochist simultaneously expresses longing for symbiotic merger with the mother and defends himself or herself against such longing. The fantasy of fusion is there, but so also is the self-defining defense against the fantasy—both wrapped up in the one masochistic act. In some acts the fantasy may appear more obvious, while in others the defense against the fantasy seems to take center stage.