ABSTRACT
In masochism, exclusion is turned to enjoyment in the most dramatic manner. The masochist’s erotic pleasure is likened to the devotee’s spiritual uplifting through mortification, while it is a commonplace to see masochism in those forms of voluntary self-abasement in which saint or philanthropist goes beyond assisting society’s rejects and actually also makes a reject of himself. The act of seeking humiliation reveals the essential irony of masochism because, in the end, the woman who does the humiliating turns out to be the real object-subject of humiliation. The truth is that all masochistic games play out a similar vengeance: when the masochist gets his partner to humiliate him, it is ultimately the partner who is being humiliated by the masochist. S. Freud describes fetishism as an illusion. Richard Krafft-Ebing had addressed “negative fetishism” when he said that some subjects are excited not by a part of a woman’s body, but by what she is missing.
