ABSTRACT
This is a kind of sorcerer’s apprentice of moral asceticism: the more ‘moral’ one becomes, the more aggression is inhibited from discharge in the social world, and thus it is turned inward on oneself. There arises the furiously moral person – the ‘saint’ – who takes himself to be such a sinner. Freud thinks that such a person has a basically correct assessment of his internal situation. So too arises the phenomenon Freud called moral masochism: the person perversely dedicated to castigating himself for being so awful.
