ABSTRACT
There is profound historical unfairness in the fact that acts of sadism gain their terminology from a man who was against capital punishment and torture at a time when such acts were common occurrences. The French aristocrat the Marquis de Sade (2 June 1740 to 2 December 1814) was a courageous politician, philosopher, and writer. During the French Revolution, he was elected delegate to the National Convention. His surname is used because of the pornographic work he wrote during his thirty-two years in prison with their unsurprising emphasis on violence, criminality, and attacks on the Catholic Church at a time when blasphemy was a serious crime. We could now consider that his ency-clopaedic understanding of all perversion was both a defence against terror of dying and a way of containing within himself the brutal acts he witnessed (Glasser, 1996, 1998).
