ABSTRACT
In ordinary inter-professional parlance referring to aggression in any clinical or applied discussion, the meaning and roles of the term have reached a complex level. The patient, rather, and the analysis that he elicited, are good clinical examples of a complex, multi-layered chronic neurosis that is the prototype of the old-fashioned, long-term mental conflicts that were the analyst's fare routinely during the early period of psychoanalysis. Sadism and masochism are clinical phenomena, the carrying to an extreme the use of aggression in the service of administering pain or suffering, which in daily mental life is used in a more moderate and controlled fashion. Whenever sadomasochism is mentioned, out comes the automatic thought or theory that sadism is aggression turned outward, while in masochism, the aggression is against the self. A psychoanalytic practice, however, is hardly a place in which sadism would be prominent.
