ABSTRACT
After Freud’s studies on the psychosexuality of the child, sadism and masochism were no longer confined solely to their psychopathological nosography but were included in attempts to describe psychic development. This chapter deconstructs the amalgam of “sadomasochism” in which they are usually combined. It clarifies their respective origins and describes how each of them plays a role in the construction of the mind at different moments of development, thereby creating the fixation points and pathologies specific to adulthood, particularly in the pathology of mourning and the constitution of the principle of reality for masochism and in the uncertainties of the epistemophilic drive for sadism.
