ABSTRACT
Sadism, cruelty, and brutality tend to be associated with coldness and lack of emotion. In thrillers and suspense films, analysts are familiar with the idea of the emotionless psychopath, the hitman, or the pitiless serial killer. The terrible carnage of the First World War was partly possible because the generals were still thinking of warfare as it was at the time of Waterloo, where two armies meet each other on the field of battle, rather than a new situation where men could be mechanically mown down in their thousands. The chapter examines examples of cases where it seemed that either emotional deprivation or traumatic, emotional experiences had resulted in a kind of emotional vacuum being created, and that what was sucked into this vacuum was various kinds of masochistic and sentimental attitudes of the sort which could loosely be summed up under the heading of Romantic Agony.
