ABSTRACT

A person who enjoys hurting a loved object is, by definition, sadistic. The individual’s hurtful actions, hostile words, destructive and humiliating behaviors, and their accompanying affect of satisfaction, led Freud and present-day psychoanalysts to conceive of sadism as a manifestation of an aggressive instinct or drive. One consequence of our revision of the understanding of aggression is that it requires a distinction between on the one hand sadism and masochism, regarded as affective and motivational states, and on the other the aggressive capacity. In this sense, sadomasochism may or may not involve aggression, but the determining influences have to do with the circumstances and meaning of the behavior and its relevant context, not with anything inherent in sadistic or masochistic actions themselves. The motivational understanding of sadism also proposes a core unconscious fantasy operative in the complex sadistic psychic activities and external behaviors.