ABSTRACT
The Freudian approach has always taken as its starting point the outward signs—sometimes extremely severe ones—of mental pathology in human beings in order to raise fundamental questions about mental life in general, to set up models of its normal functioning, and to put forward hypotheses concerning how it comes about in living organisms. There are three terms in the very first paragraph of the paper that are well worth examining more closely: mysterious, economic, and drug. The concept of primary masochism is, thus, intrinsically linked to the body and to the effort that is put into thinking how a somatic element can be transformed into its psychical equivalent. It is important to realise that the effect of a non-response to an expectation in the sense dimension is not a matter of frustration, but of deprivation.
