The five faces of masochism

Начало книги

A work bearing the title of The Five Bloods of Ireland would need no justification for its title other than that the contents of the work deal with the five principal septs or families of Ireland, i.e., the O'Neils, the O'Connors, the O'Briens, the O'Lachlans, and the M'Murroughs; a title of The Five Nations would likewise be as easily justified if the work dealt with the five confederated Indian tribes (the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas), or, as was the case with Rudyard Kipling's volume of poems, if "the five nations" were the five component parts of the British Empire.

Similarly, a title such as The Five Faces of Masochism would, understandably, suggest to the reader that there are but five – no more and no less – forms or manifestations of that certain peculiar facet of human behavior, or misbehavior, to which Richard von Krafft-Ebing in the latter part of the nineteenth century gave the name of masochism. Such a suggestion, it should be stressed at the very outset of this work, is not intended to be anything other than one of convenience – the "masochistic scale" of five simply meaning to reflect the degree or severity of masochistic tendencies and should not be allowed to dominate the reader's thought as anything other than a comparative aid. Suffice it to say that, in the opinion of this author, the majority of people – the psychological median, so to speak – would probably fall within "masochism one" and "sadism one" range. Somewhere between these two, at "zero", the masochistic and the sadistic inclinations are in a state of equilibrium, or, to put it in other words, are both weak and simultaneously equal, thereby canceling each other out.

Читать дальше →