ABSTRACT
‘The economic problem of masochism’ marks the conclusion of Sigmund Freud’s reflections on a symptom that in 1924 he still considered ‘incomprehensible’. In attributing the etiopathogenesis of the beating fantasies to an effect of posteriority, Freud seems to express the need to go back to a ‘prehistory’ of the subject. At the start of ‘The economic problem of masochism’, Freud declares that he wants to return to some questions left unresolved in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. From Freud onward almost everyone concerned with masochism has for the most part interpreted it with reference to the external, biographical context and the structure of the patient’s psyche. Masochism would be a way of caring for a deficient Ego, of procuring the pleasure of the relationship with the object, with a view to instinctual satisfaction.
