Masochism and Male Subjectivity PDF

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The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (Mantegna)
Published by Duke University Press

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Masochism and Male Subjectivity

Kaja Silverman
Perversion: Turning aside from truth or right; diversion to an improper
use. . . .
(OED)
What is the “truth” or “right” from which perversion turns aside, and
what does it improperly use? The O E D goes some way towards an-
swering these questions when it quotes, by way of illustration, part
of a line from Francis Bacon: “Women to govern men . . . slaves
freemen . . . being total violations and perversions of the law of nature
and nations.” According to this grammatically “deviant” citation, per-
version turns aside from both biology and the social order, and it does
so through the improper deployment or negation of the binarisms
upon which each regime depends- binarisms that reinforce each other
in the case of gender, if not that of class. The “truth” or “right” which
is thus subverted is the principle of hierarchy.
Freud’s account of perversion also stresses its diversionary and de-
centering character. c‘Perversions,’’he writes in Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality, “are sexual activities which either (a) extend, in
an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body which are des-
ignated for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations
to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on
the path toward the final sexual aim.”’ Here, in utter disregard for
Western metaphysics, with its contempt for the body, the “true” or
“right” is heterosexual penetration. All other sexual activities belong
either to the category of “fore-play,” in which case they are strictly
subordinated to “end-pleasure,’’ or perversion.
Coitus is itself a reprise in miniature of the history of infantile
sexuality, a history that begins with oral gratification and culminates
with genital desire for an object of the opposite gender. Here too the
subject is exhorted to keep his or her eyes on the finish line, and to
move as expeditiously as possible through the preliminary stages. But
This essay is part of a longer study of “deviant” or non-phallic male subjectivity,

entitled Male Subjectivity at the Margins (forthcoming).

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32 in both cases perversion intrudes as the temptation to engage in a

different kind of erotic narrative, one whose organization is aleatory
and paratactic rather than direct and hypotactic, preferring fore-pleas-
ures to end-pleasures, and browsing to discharge. Since every external
and internal organ is capable of becoming an erotogenic zone, sexuality
need not even be limited to the three stages Freud decreed for boys,
or the four he ordained for girls. Infantile sexuality is polymorphously
perverse, and even in the erotic activities of the most “normal” adult
there are “rudiments, which, if they had developed, would have led
to the deviations described as
I do not mean to suggest that polymorphous sexuality is more “nat-
ural” than genital sexuality. There is no form of human sexuality which
does not marginalize need or substitute a phantasmati? object for the
original and nutritive object. As Laplanche explains, “Sexuality is
. . . a localized, autoerotic pleasure, a pleasure of the organ ‘in place’,
in opposition to a functional pleasure with all that implies of an opening
toward the object. . . . Thus a natural, functional rhythm (that of
rutting) disappears, while elsewhere there emerges a different kind of
sequence, which is incomprehensible without calling into play such
categories as repression, reminiscences, work of elaboration, ‘deferred
a~tion’.’’~
The notion of a deferred action has a particular relevance within
the present discussion since infantile sexuality assumes the narrative
coherence of “stages” only after the fact, from the vantage point of
the Oedipus complex. The concept of perversion is equally unthinkable
apart from the Oedipus complex, since it derives all its meaning and
force from its relation to that structuring moment and the premium
it places upon genital sexuality. It is in fact something of a misnomer
to characterize infantile sexuality as “polymorphously perverse” since
sexuality only becomes perverse at the point where it constitutes either
a retreat from Oedipal structuration, or a transgressive acting out of
its dictates. What I am trying to say is that perversion always conrains
the trace of Oedipus within it-that it always represents some kind
of response to what it repudiates, and is always organized to some
degree by what it subverts.
It is crucial, then, that we grasp the double nature of perversion,
that we understand it as simultaneously a capitulation and a revolt.
The rather sparse theoretical work available in English that has in
some way engaged with the topic of perversion always seems to em-
phasize one of these aspects at the expense of the other. For Foucault,
who stands at one extreme, perversion has no subversive edge; it merely
serves to extend the surface upon which power is exercised. He insists
in The History ofSexuafitythat “polymorphous conducts [are] actually

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extracted from people’s bodies and from their pleasures” by what 33

might be called “the society of the panopticon”-that perversion is
“drawn out, revealed, isolated, intensified, incorporated, by multifar-
ious power device^."^ At the other extreme there is a volume like the
polysexuality issue of Semiotext(e),6which heaps perversion upon per-
version with reckless abandon in the vain hope of burying Oedipus
altogether. Neither position is adequate to the complexities of the issues
involved.
Ironically, it is a rather hateful book by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel-
a book which consistently comes down on the side of the father,
“mature” sexuality, and a well-fortified ego-that seems best to intuit
the challenge that perversion poses to the symbolic order. She cautions
that “the pervert is trying to free himself from the paternal universe
and the constraints of the law. He wants to dethrone God the Father.”’
Her reading of perversion suggests that its significance extends far
beyond the domain of the strictly sexual (if, indeed, such a domain
ever existed)-suggests, that is, that it turns aside not only from hi-
erarchy and genital sexuality, but from the paternal signifier, the ul-
timate “truth” or “right.” As I will attempt to demonstrate later in
this essay with respect to masochism, at certain moments perversion
may pose such a radical challenge to sexual difference as to enact
precisely the scenario condemned by Bacon: one where women govern
men, and slaves freemen.
Although I will not be exploring these issues at any length in the
present essay, it should at least be noted that the theoretical interest
of perversion extends beyond the disruptive force it brings to bear
upon gender. It strips sexuality of all functionality, whether biological
or social; in an even more extreme fashion than “normal” sexuality,
it puts the body and the world of objects to uses that have nothing
whatever to do with any kind of “immanent” design or purpose.
Perversion also subverts many of the binary oppositions upon which
the social order rests: it crosses the boundary separating food from
excrement (coprophilia); human from animal (bestiality); life from
death (necrophilia); adult from child (pederasty); and pleasure from
pain (masochism).
Of course not all perversions are equally disruptive, or even equally
interesting. It is unfortunate but not surprising that the perversion
which has commandeered most of the literary and theoretical atten-
tion-sadism-is also the one which is most compatible with conven-
tional heterosexuality. (The first thing that Freud says about sadism
in Three Essays is that “the sexuality of most human beings contains
an element of aggressiveness-the desire to subjugate.” He adds that
the “biological significance” of this combination

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34 seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object
by means other than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond
to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become in-
dependent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading
position. (23-24)
The Ego and the Id describes sadism’s combination of cruelty and

sexuality as a “serviceable fusion.”)* The work of Sade commands
enormous intellectual prestige -something inconceivable with the nov-
els of Sacher-Masoch, rescued from oblivion by Deleuze. One thinks
in this respect not only of Bataille,’O Barthes’l and Gallop,12 but of
the massive double issue of Obligues dedicated to Sade, which includes
materials from Benoit, Klossowski, Blanchot, Robbe-Grillet, Sollers,
Paulhan, Breton, Mandiargues, Masson and Labisse, to name only a
few of its contributor^.'^
The focus of this essay is the perversion which is most commonly
linked with sadism, sometimes as its complement and at other times
as its instinctual opposite. I refer of course to masochism, variously
described by Freud as the “nicest7’14and the most “ d a n g e r o ~ s ”of
~~
libidinal infractions. I have returned frequently (compulsively?) to this
topic over the past eight years, but always through a literary or cin-
ematic intermediary.16This time the approach will be more insistently
theoretical and speculative.
In his last work to deal extensively with masochism, Freud distinguishes

between three forms of that perversion: “erotogenic,” ccfeminine,”and
However, no sooner are these distinctions enumerated than
they begin to erode. Erotogenic masochism, which Freud defines as
“pleasure in pain,” is said to lie “at the bottom” of both feminine and
moral masochism, and so to provide a common base or support. The
tripartite division thus gives way rather quickly to one of those dualisms
of which Freud is so fond, with both feminine and moral masochism
“bleeding” into each other at the point where each abuts into ero-
togenic masochism.
The adjective “erotogeni~~’ is one which Freud habitually links with
cc
zone,” and with which he designates a part of the body at which
sexual excitation concentrates. Implicit, then, in the notion of maso-
chism, whether feminine or moral, would seem to be the experience
of corporeal pleasure, or -to be more precise -corporeal pleasure-in-
pain. This stipulation poses no real conceptual difficulties with respect
to the first of those categories; erotogenic masochism would seem to
be literally “at the bottom” of feminine masochism, which Freud
associates with phantasies of being bound and beaten, and with the

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desire to be “treated like . . . a naughty child.”’* It is far less clear 35

how moral masochism could be said to have a necessary corporeal
substratum, until we recall that Three Essays extends the quality of
erotogenicity to internal organs as well as external ones (49-50, SOf),
and until we annex to that recollection the various diagrams (from
The Interpretation of Dreams to New Introductory Lectures) by which
Freud attempts to visualize the psyche as a ccplace.7719 If, as “The
Economic Problem of Masochism” suggests, the “true” masochist
“always turns his cheek whenever he has a chance of receiving a blow”
(165), the moral masochist’s cheek is the ego. That is the erotogenic
zone of choice, the site where he or she seeks to be beaten. (Could
Freud have been thinking about this when he remarked that the ego
is “first and foremost a bodily
Curiously, after characterizing feminine masochism as “the one that
is the most accessible to our observation,” Freud announces that owing
to the “material at [his] command,” he will limit his discussion of that
libidinal economy entirely to male patients (161). The inference is
obvious: feminine masochism is a specifically male pathology, so
named because it positions its sufferer as a woman. Freud in fact says
as much:
. . . if one has the opportunity of studying cases in which the masochistic.
phantasies have been especially richly elaborated, one quickly discovers
that they place the subject in a characteristically feminine situation; they
signify, that is, being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby.
For this reason I have called this form of masochism, a potiori as it were
. . . the feminine form, although so many of its features point to infantile
life. (162)
The reader is likely to object at this point that only five years earlier
Freud had clearly identified the beating phantasy primarily with
women. (Of the six patients upon whom he bases “A Child Is Being
Beaten,” four are female, and only two male.)21And from Three Essays
until New Introductory Lectures, Freud was to maintain, albeit with
certain crucial qualifications, the connection between femininity and
masochism.22 Yet, “The Economic Problem of Masochism” is not the
only major work on masochism to focus primarily upon male patients.
Krafft-Ebing, who gave masochism its name and its first definition,
cites thirty-three cases of male masochism, and only three of female.23
(He also names masochism after a male masochist, Leopold von Sacher-
Masoch.) Reik’s research had similar results, leading him to conclude
that “the male sex is more masochistic than the female.’724In his study
of cruelty, Deleuze not only focuses exclusively on the novels of Sacher-
Masoch, but elaborates a theoretical model of masochism in which

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36 the suffering position is almost necessarily male. What is to be made

of this anomaly, whereby Freud designates as “feminine” a psychic
disorder whose victims are primarily men?
While I would certainly dispute Reik’s notion that men are more
masochistic than women, it does seem to me that pathological mas-
ochism is almost by very definition a male rather than a female phe-
nomenon. Although masochism is a centrally structuring element of
both male and female subjectivity, it is only in the latter that it can
be safely acknowledged. It is an accepted-indeed a requisite-element
of c‘normaly’female subjectivity, providing a crucial mechanism for
eroticizing lack and subordination. The male subject, on the contrary,
cannot avow his masochism without calling into question his identi-
fication with the masculine position, and aligning himself with femi-
ninity. All this is just another way of saying that what is acceptable
for the female subject is pathological for the male. Freud indicates as
much when he tells us that whereas the beating phantasy can be
effortlessly accommodated within the little girl’s positive Oedipus com-
plex (i.e., within the structure that ties her libidinally to the father and
narcissistically to the mother), it can only be contained within the little
boy’s negative Oedipus complex (i.e., within the structure that com-
pletely mirrors the little girl’s, but which within the usual course of
development is ruthlessly subordinated to love for the mother and
identification with the father).25 The feminine masochist, in other
words, whether male or female, occupies the place of the mother, and
cathects erotically with the father.
The disruptive consequences of male masochism are also under-
scored by an extraordinary passage from Reik, in which he distin-
guishes the masochistic phantasies of women from those of men:
Compared with the masculine masochism that of women shows a somewhat
attenuated, one could almost say anemic character. It is more of a tres-
passing of the bourgeois border, of which one nevertheless remains aware,
than an invasion into enemy terrain. The woman’s masochistic phantasy
very seldom reaches the pitch of savage lust, of ecstasy, as does that of the
man. Even the orgy in the phantasy does not ascend in so steep a curve.
There is nothing in it of the wildness of chained Prometheus, rather some-
thing of Ganymede’s submission. One does not feel anything of the cy-
clonelike character that is so often associated with masculine masochism.
The masochism of woman has the character of yielding and surrender
rather than of the rush ahead, of the orgiastic cumulation, of the self-
abandonment of man. ( 2 )
What Reik suggests here is that even the clinically masochistic woman
does not really exceed her subjective limits; she merely- stretches them
a bit. The male masochist, on the other hand, leaves his social identity

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completely behind-actually abandons his “self” -and passes over 37

into the “enemy terrain” of femininity. I will have more to say later
about what has been called the “shattering” qualities of male maso-
chism,26 but suffice it to note here that the sexual phantasies cited by
Reik fully bear out these characterizations, as do those included by
Krafft-Ebing.
Not only does it turn out that feminine masochism doesn’t have very
much to do with women, but that moral masochism doesn’t have very
much to do with virtue. Although the moral masochist seems to be
under the domination of a hyper-developed conscience, his or her desire
for punishment is so great as to pose a constant temptation to perform
“sinful” actions, which must then be “expiated.” Freud warns that
moral masochism is in fact capable of swallowing up conscience al-
together, of perverting it from within.27 This invisible sabotage occurs
through the complete reversal of the process whereby the Oedipus
complex was earlier “dissolved,” i.e., of the operation whereby the
paternal voice and imago were internalized as the super-ego. By de-
riving erotic gratification from the super-ego’s censorship and punish-
ment, the morally masochistic ego not only assumes an analogous
position to that adopted by his or her more flamboyantly ‘‘feminine”
counterpart in phantasy or actual sexual practice, but reactivates the
Oedipus complex.
Significantly, what flares up with renewed intensity is that form of
the Oedipus complex which is positive for the female subject, but
negative for the male-the form, that is, which turns upon desire for
the father and identification with the mother. Freud is quite explicit
a bout this:
We were able to translate the expression “unconsciQus sense of guilt” as
meaning a desire for punishment at the hands of a parental power. We
know that the wish, which so frequently appears in phantasies, to be beaten
by the father stands very close to the other wish, to have a passive (feminine)
sexual relation to him and is only a regressive distortion of it. If we insert
this explanation into the content of moral masochism, its hidden meaning
becomes clear to us2’
Thus through moral masochism the ego is beatedloved by the father,

a situation which -once again -is “normal” for the female subject,
but deviant for the male.
It would consequently seem that moral and feminine masochism
develop out of the same “phantasmatic,” to borrow a word from
Laplanche and Pontalis -out of the same unconsciously structuring
scenario or action.29 However, the moral masochist remains oblivious
to the passion for self-destruction that burns ferociously within; Freud

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38 observes that whereas the sadism of the super-ego “becomes for the
most part glaringly conscious,” the masochism of the ego “remains as
a rule concealed from the subject and has to be inferred from his
behavior.”30 With the feminine masochist, on the other hand, the
beating phantasy assumes a shape which is available to consciousness,
albeit not necessarily to rational scrutiny.
Let us look rather more closely at these two categories of masochism,
and at the forms they assume in both conscious and unconscious life.
With a frankness which is more alarming than engaging, Freud ac-

knowledges in The Ego and the Id that under certain circumstances
the super-ego promotes a “pure culture of the death drive” (43). The
stronger that psychic entity-i.e., the more thoroughly the subject has
been subordinated to prohibition and denial-the greater the possi-
bility that the ego will be “driven” to the last extremity. In moral
masochism the super-ego assumes titanic proportions, but even under
much more auspicious conditions its authority and severity are so
considerable as to call fundamentally into question the notion of a
“healthy” subject, let alone one who might be said to be in a position
of mastery or control. Since “normal” subjectivity so closely adjoins
moral masochism, I want to examine it briefly through the grid of
Freud’s late topography before turning once again to its pathological
correlate.
We recall that the super-ego is the agency whereby the Oedipus
complex is neutralized, but its effects indefinitely prolonged. It is
formed through the phantasmatization and introjection of what cannot
be possessed in reality, and must consequently be renounced- the
parents. This process of introjection is a complex one, more hinted at
than specified in The Ego and the Id, but clarified somewhat in New
Introductory Lectures on Psy~ho-AnaZysis.~’ It develops out of two
sets of relationships, one of which is synonymous with the positive
Oedipus complex, and the other of which is synonymous with the
negative Oedipus complex, a point to which I will return in a moment.
The super-ego would also seem to involve two different kinds of in-
trojection, one of which I will characterize as “imaginary” and the
other as “symbolic.” What I mean by imaginary introjection is the
psychic process whereby once-loved figures are taken into the self as
subjective models or exempla, i.e., the formation of that image or
cluster of images in which the ego sees itself as it would like to be
seen. Symbolic introjection, on the other hand, designates the psychic
process whereby the subject is subordinated to the Law and the phallus.
What I am trying to get at with this distinction between imaginary
and symbolic introjection is a way of distinguishing the ego-ideal from

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the super-ego with which Freud conflates it, without at the same time 39
denying the close connections between those two agencies. I will con-
sequently be using the term “super-ego” in two ways in this essay-
as a portmanteau category, encompassing all of the functions resulting
from the phantasmatization and assimilation of the parents, and as a
more restrictive category, designating what results from symbolic in-
trojection. I will reserve the category of the ego-ideal for imaginary
introjection.
Because the subject usually goes through a negative as well as a
positive Oedipus complex, he or she enters into two sets of identifi-
cations at the end of the complex: one with the imago of the mother,
and the other with the imago of the father.32One of these identifications
is generally much stronger, and so tends to eclipse the other. If all goes
according to cultural plan, the stronger identification conforms to the
positive Oedipus complex. Nevertheless, both have a part to play in
the “precipitate” which they form within the ego, a precipitate which
Freud describes as the “ego-ideal or super-ego,” but which is more
usefully designated by the first of those appellations.
The ego-ideal, I would maintain, represents one area or function of
the super-ego but not its entirety, that “face” of each parent which is
loved rather than feared. It articulates the ideal identity to which the
ego aspires, and by which it constantly measures itself, but in relation
to which it is always found wanting. It is the mirror in which the
subject would like to see itself reflected, the repository of everything
it admires.
The introjection of these parental images desexualizes them, with
the positive Oedipus complex cancelling out the object-choice of the
negative complex, and the negative Oedipus complex cancelling out
the object-choice of the positive complex. Desire for the father, in other
words, gives way to identification with him, and desire for the mother
to identification with her:
The father-identification will preserve the object-relation to the mother
which belonged to the positive complex and will at the same time replace
the object-relation to the father which belonged to the inverted complex:
and the same will be true, mutatis mutandis, of the mother identifi~ation.~~
This desexualization has grave consequences for the ego, since it results
in an instinctual defusion; when object-libido changes to narcissistic
libido (that is, when love changes to identification), the aggression
which was earlier commingled with that libido also loses its purchase,
and turns around upon the subject’s own self. No longer in the pro-
tective custody of eros, that aggression falls under the jurisdiction of
the super-ego, which directs it against the ego. But I have not yet

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40 accounted for that facet of the super-ego capable of “behaving” with

such animus toward the ego. I shall try to do so now.
Freud has some very inconsistent things to say about the gender of
the super-ego. At some points in The Ego and the Id he associates it
with both parents, as we have seen, but at other points he connects
it exclusively with the father. In one particularly important passage,
in which he places great emphasis upon the paternal identity of the
super-ego, he refers to the “double aspect” of that psychic entity, an
aspect which he equates with two mutually exclusive imperatives: “You
ought to be like this (like your father) and “You may not be like this
(like your father) -that is, you may not do all that he does; some
things are his p r e r ~ g a t i v e . The
~’~~first of these commands clearly issues
from the ego-ideal, whose function is to promote similitude between
itself and the ego, but where does the second command come from?
It comes, as Freud’s reference to a “double aspect” would suggest,
from another component of the super-ego, and one whose gender is
much more delimited than that of the ego-ideal. This other component,
I would maintain, is formed through the introjection of the symbolic
father rather than his imaginary counterpart- through the internali-
zation of the father as Law, Gaze, voice-on-high. This element of the
super-ego has no necessary relation to any historical figure, but its
gender is irreducibly masculine, at least within the present social order.
It is, quite simply, the paternal function, and the ego is always-already
guilty in relation to it-guilty by virtue of Oedipal desire.
Curiously, in light of the double parental complex, with the expec-
tation it creates that both parents would have a part to play in the
constitution of the super-ego, Freud asserts that the entity is always
“a substitute for a longing for the father” (27).The context in which
he makes this observation indicates that he is speaking not about the
ego-ideal, but about that psychic entity which I will henceforth des-
ignate the super-ego tout court. (Freud adds that the psychic entity
which replaces desire for the father “contains the germ from which
all religions have evolved,” and produces. “the self-judgment which
declares that the ego falls short of its ideal.”) This passage from The
Ego and the Id consequently has staggering implications. It suggests
that what is really at issue in the dissolution of the male Oedipus
complex- that what really motivates Freud to insist so strenuously
upon its definitive terminus-is the male subject’s homosexual at-
tachment to the father, not his erotic investment in the mother. It also
explains why Freud doesn’t think the super-ego plays as central a role
in the development of the female subject, since there desire for the
father is not only acceptable but requisite. However, the point upon
which I want to place greatest emphasis at this juncture is that the

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relationship of the male ego to the super-ego would seem to grow out 41
of the romance between the father and son, or to be more precise, out
of the romance between the father in his symbolic guise and the son
whose subordination is a substitute for love- that the “exemplary”
male subject can be produced only through the negative Oedipus com-
plex.
The situation is even more explosive than I have so far shown it to
be. There is a fundamental impossibility about the position in which
the male subject is held, an impossibility which has to do with the
self-cancelling structure of the Oedipal imperative. The only mecha-
nism by which the son can overcome his desire for the father is to
transform object-libido into narcissistic-libido, and in so doing to at-
tempt to become the (symbolic) father. However, this metamorphosis
is precisely what the super-ego prohibits by decreeing: “You may not
be like [your father] . . . you may not do all that he does; some things
are his prerogative.” The paternal law thus promotes the very thing
that its severity is calculated to prevent, a contradiction which must
function as a constant inducement to reconstitute the negative Oedipus
complex.
It is hardly surprising, in view of all this, that the relationship of
the ego to the super-ego should be susceptible to sexualization; eros
is in fact never far away. But what form does this “sexuality” take?
Freud leaves us in no doubt on this particular point. In Civilization
and its Discontents he describes a situation where the ego comes to
take pleasure in the pain inflicted upon it by the super-ego-where
fear of punishment gives way to the wish for it, and where cruelty and
discipline come to stand for love:
The sense of guilt, the harshness of the super-ego is . . . the same thing as
the severity of the conscience. It is the perception which the ego has of
being watched over in this way, the assessment of the tension between its
own striving and the demands of the super-ego. The fear of this critical
agency (a fear which is at the bottom of the whole relationship), the need
for punishment, is an instinctual manifestation on the part of the ego, which
has become masochistic under the influence of a sadistic super-ego; it is a
portion . . . of the instinct toward internal destruction present in the ego,
employed by forming an erotic attachment to the super-ego. (83)
This description conforms precisely to what Freud was somewhat later

to name “moral masochism.” However, the condition it describes
differs from “normalcy” only in degree and erotic intent. The “or-
dinary” male subject oscillates endlessly between the mutually exclu-
sive commands of the (male) ego-ideal and super-ego, wanting both
to love the father and to be the father, but prevented from doing either.

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42 The morally masochistic male subject has given up on the desire to

be the father, and may in fact have turned away from the paternal
ego-ideal to the maternal one, and from identification with the father
to identification with the mother. However, he burns with an exalted
ardor for the rigors of the super-ego. The feminine masochist, to whom
I shall return later in this essay, literalizes the beating phantasy, and
brings this cruel drama back to the body.
Reik’s exhaustive study of masochism warrants some attention at this

point, both because it has been so extensively mined by Deleuze and
others, and because it manifests so extreme a sensitivity to the formal
features of the pathology. Although it begins with a discussion of
masochism as a sexual perversion-a discussion studded with some
quite compelling phantasies, to one of which we will circle back later -
its chief focus is moral (or what Reik calls “social”) masochism. Mas-
ochism in Sex and Society characterizes that psychic economy as closed
and self- referential, and associates it with exhibitionism or “demon-
strativeness,” revolutionary fervor, and “suspense” -a surprising cat-
alogue at first glance (44-94).As I will attempt to demonstrate, certain
parts of this definition clearly pertain to that model of moral masochism
which Freud associates with the ego/super-egodynamic, but other parts
point toward a rather different paradigm.
Reik has this to say at the beginning of a chapter on the “goal” of
moral masochism:
. . . social masochism springs from the intermediate phase of the devel-
opment of phantasy, during which the pain-inflicting and the pain-enduring
person are identical, impersonating [my emphasis] simultaneously object
and subject. Also in the masochistic attitude toward life there is generally
no object discernible that imposes the suffering and is independent of the
ego. It is certainly extant in phantasy, but it does not appear in reality and
remains in the twilight where it merges into the ego. This type of masochistic
character behaves almost autoerotically. (333)
The notion of moral masochism as a kind of chamber play for two in
which the same actor plays both parts follows logically from the ego/
super-ego model, where psychic differentiation makes it possible for
the subject to functipn both as the one who punishes and the one who
is punished. This kind of “do it yourself masochism” is generally
regarded as an intermediate stage, mid-way between other-directed
aggression and masochism “proper,” which requires a second player.
In “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” Freud refers to it as a ‘creflexi~e7’
or “middle voice.” Its defining feature is the turning around of erotically
charged aggression upon the subject’s own self.36

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However, the word with which Reik characterizes the actions of 43

these two psychic agents -“impersonation” -indicates that their be-
havior mimics some prototype, which is of course the case. As I have
already stressed, the super-ego is formed through the introjection of
the paternal function, just as the ego is formed initially through the
subject’s identification with its own corporeal imago, and subsequently
through identification with the parents. The interior drama is thus no
more than the virtual image of the familial structure, which itself
interlocks with the whole social order. I will have more to say about
masochism’s propensity for “impersonation7’ shortly.
The second of the qualities enumerated above-exhibitionism or
“demon~trativene~~’~ -is one which Reik claims to be an indispensable
feature of all masochism:
. . . in no case of masochism can the fact be overlooked that the suffering,
discomfort, humiliation and disgrace are being shown and so to speak put
on display. . . . In the practices of masochists, denudation and parading
with all their psychic concomitant phenomena play such a major part that
one feels induced to assume a constant connection between masochism and
exhibitionism. (72)
Many of Reik’s most striking examples of the “demonstrative feature”
are drawn from moral or social masochism. However, Freud asserts
just the opposite of that pathology, observing (as I have already men-
tioned) that whereas the super-ego’s desire to inflict injury is usually
“glaringly” obvious, the ego’s desire for punishment generally escapes
the attention both of others and of the subject itself. How are we to
resolve this theoretical contradiction?
A quick survey of Reik’s examples reveals him to be less concerned
with the egohper-ego relationship than with classic Christianity, and
suggests that his attention may be focused on a different variety of
moral masochism from that spotlighted by Freud. Not only does he
devote a whole chapter to “the paradoxes of Christ,” but most of the
other cases he cites are drawn from the lives of saints and martyrs.
Here too the subject seems ardently given over to self-mortification of
one kind or another (one particularly commodious sentence functions
as a kind of display-window, disclosing “Benedict rolling himself in
thorn hedges, Macarius sitting naked on an ant-hill, [and] Anthony
flagellating himself incessantly” [35l]), but the dynamics are quite
different. To begin with, the cast of characters is not necessarily limited
to one, and an audience is a structural necessity, although it may be
either earthly or heavenly. Second, the body is centrally on display,
whether it is being consumed by ants or roasting over a fire. Finally,
behind all these “scenes” or “exhibits” is the master tableau or group

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44 phantasy-Christ nailed to the cross, head wreathed in thorns and

blood dripping from his impaled sides. What is being beaten here is
not so much the body as the flesh, and beyond that sin itself, and the
whole fallen world.
This last target pits the Christian masochist against the society in
which he or she lives, makes of that figure a rebel, or even a revolu-
tionary of sorts. In this particular sub-species of moral masochism
there would thus seem to be a strong heterocosmic impulse- the desire
to remake the world in another image altogether, to forge a different
cultural order. The Christian masochist also seeks to remake him or
herself according to the exemplum of the suffering Christ, the very
picture of divestiture and loss. Insofar as such an identification implies
the complete and utter negation of all phallic values, Christian mas-
ochism has radically emasculating implications, and is intrinsically
incompatible with the phallic pretensions of masculinity. And since its
primary exemplar is a male rather than a female subject, those im-
plications would seem impossible to ignore. Remarkably, Christianity
also redefines the paternal legacy; it is after all through the assumption
of his place within the holy family that Christ comes to be installed
in a suffering and castrated position.
However, it is difficult to say what this form of moral masochism
ultimately demonstrates, since it seems to be particularly prone to
simulation and masquerade. Reik comments on the Christian ma-
sochist’s gift for impersonation more than once, noting on one occasion
that “the lambskin he wears hides a wolf,” and pointing on another
to the pride that glows beneath the veneer of h~mility.~’ This talent
for mimicry may lie at the bottom of all masochism, although Reik
does not generalize it in this way. I have already commented upon its
place within the egohuper-ego alliance, and will have occasion to do
the same later in this essay with respect to masochistic sexual phantasy
and practice.
The last of the qualities enumerated above -suspense-would also
seem to be at the center of all forms of masochism, in addition to
being one of the conditions out of which conventional subjectivity
develops. Reik rings some complex changes on this word, which he
connects with uncertainty, dilatoriness, pleasurable and unpleasurable
anticipation, apparent interminability, and-above all-excitation.
Masochism exploits all these meanings in one way or another because
it always seeks to prolong preparatory detail and ritual at the expense
of climax or consummation.
The larger thesis which Reik pursues over the length of his study is
that the masochist is apprehensive about end-pleasure because it is so
fully associated with punishment, and so seeks to delay it as long as

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possible (“The . . . characteristic of the masochistic tension-curve is 45

the tendency to prolong the tension, while we meet with the opposite
intention, of resolving the tension, in normal sexual life” [60]).How-
ever, Reik also maintains elsewhere in Masochism in Sex and Society
that the masochist rushes toward the punishment he or she fears in
order to get it over with as quickly as possible. Through this “flight
forward” the normal sequence of pleasure and pain is reversed, and
the latter is experienced before the former. This is how Reik accounts
for the suffering in masochism, to which he claims the subject would
never submit except as the “price” of what is always fundamentally
a sexual gratification.
There is a basic contradiction here: if the masochist rushes to ex-
perience the necessary punishment before indulging in a pleasure so
as to thereby assure an untroubled enjoyment of it, why should he or
she then delay the moment of gratification for as long as possible out
of fear of the consequences? This contradiction is part and parcel of
Reik’s refusal to admit that the masochist in fact seeks out punishment,
or his inability to entertain the possibility that for some individuals
pleasure might actually inhere in pain.
Such an eventuality would represent the radical perversion of the
pleasure principle, which “endeavors to keep the quantity of excitation
present in [the mental apparatus] as low as possible or at least to keep
it constant”38-would indicate, that is, that pleasure (and specifically
sexual pleasure) can accompany an excruciating increase in such ten-
sion, as well as the actual presence of pain. However, it is not as though
Freud himself has not prepared us for such a development. He remarks
on more than one occasion that pain “trenches” into pleasure, a verb
which the O E D glosses as “to ‘cut’ into, to enter into so as to affect
intimately.” Three Essays includes the observation that “nothing of
considerable importance can occur in the organism without contrib-
uting some component to the excitation of the sexual instinct” (71),
and “The Economic Problem of Masochism” adds that “the excitation
of pain and pleasure would be bound to have the same effect too”
(163). However, Freud’s theory of pleasure is closely imbricated with
his account of the way in which identity is formed, i.e., with what he
has to say about the secondary process and the maintenance of a
quiescently cathected ego. As Leo Bersani has recently pointed out,
the introduction of large quantities of excitation into the psychic econ-
omy can only have a “shattering” effect upon this coherence, pitting
the pathology of masochism (which for him means sexuality tout
simple) against identity itself:
. . . the pleasurable unpleasurabie tension of sexual excitement occurs when
the body’s “normal” range of sensation is exceeded, and when the organ-

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46 ization of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective proc-

esses somehow “beyond” those compatible with psychic organizations.
. . . Sexuality [i-e., masochism] would be that which is intolerable to the
structured self. . . . Sexuality . . . may depend on the dicafage or gap, in
human life between the quantities of stimuli to which we are exposed and
the development of ego structures capable of resisting or . . . binding those
stimuli. The secret of sexuality is that we seek not only to get rid of this
shattering tension but also to repeat, even increase it.39
What masochism really “suspends” is thus not just the pleasure prin-
ciple, but the libidinal and psychic constancy that principle supports.
But what are the forms that this suspense takes in moral masochism?
The Christian, of course, lives his or her life in perpetual anticipation
of the second coming. The figural meaning which this anticipation
implants in present sufferings makes it possible for them to be savored
as future pleasures, with time folding over itself in such a way as to
permit that retroactivity to be already experienced now, in a moment
prior to its effectivity. Such is the fundamentally perverse nature of
Christian suspense and the pain it sanctifies and irradiates, a suspense
which works against anything approximating psychic coherence.
Freud’s moral masochist also lives in suspense, but without the
promise of redemptive end-pleasure. Here suspense has a double face.
It signifies both the endless postponement of libidinal gratification,
and the perpetual state of anxiety and apprehension which is the result
of that renunciation and of the super-ego’s relentless surveillance. Of
course these forms of suspense are not limited to the moral masochist;
they are also part of the cultural legacy of even the most conventionally
structured of subjects. All that distinguishes the former from the latter
is that his or her ego seeks to increase rather than decrease that tension,
whether through the commission of misdeeds which will then elicit
punishment, or -more classically- through the punctiliousness of its
obedience. (Freud warns us that the more perfectly the ego conforms
to the super-ego’s mandates, the more ferocious and exacting that
censoring mechanism becomes.40 It would thus seem that the ego’s
“goodness” can actually become a request to be beaten.) The moral
masochist, in short, seeks to intensify both forms of the suspense which
is so (seemingly) intolerable to the “ordinary” subject. Freud is quite
explicit about the challenge which this poses to the stability and ro-
bustness of the ego, remarking in “The Economic Problem of Mas-
ochism” that “in order to provoke punishment from [the super-ego],
the masochist must do what is inexpedient, must act against his own
interests, must ruin the prospects which open out to him in the real
world and must, perhaps, destroy his own real existence” (169-70).

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Let us now turn to feminine masochism via “A Child Is Being Beaten,” 47

which is without a doubt the most crucial text for understanding that
perversion. Significantly, although Freud focuses primarily upon female
patients there, he manages to articulate the masochistic desire he at-
tributes to them only through recourse to one of his male patients,
who speaks what they are unable to-the second phase of the beating
. ~ ~recall that the female phantasy consists of three phases,
p h a n t a ~ yWe
the first and third of which are available to analysis, but the second
of which remains unconscious. Here is the complete sequence, after it
has been ccdoctored7’by Freud (the phrases within square brackets
represent either his interpolations, or additions made by the patient
at his prompting):
Phase 1: “My father is beating the child [whom I hate].”
Phase 2: “I am being beaten by my father.”
Phase 3: “Some boys are being beaten. [I am probably looking on.]”
Freud says of the first phase that it is neither sexual nor sadistic, but
“the stuff from which both will come” (182). He adds that it may not
even constitute part of the phantasy proper, but may simply be a
memory out of which the phantasy subsequently develops. It is savored
for the erotic value it retroactively assumes, a value which Freud
translates with the phrase: “My father does not love this other child,
he loves only me” (181). The Oedipal prohibition intervenes between
the first and second phase, determining the form that the latter will
take. The phantasizing subject now imagines herself in the position
previously occupied by the anonymous child, ostensibly by way of
punishment for transgressive desires. However, this phase of the phan-
tasy evokes intensely pleasurable feelings, pointing to an erotic as well
as punitive content. Freud argues that phase 2--“1 am being beaten
by my father”-also marks the regression from early genital sexuality
to anal sexuality. It thus functions simultaneously to deny the father’s
love and to fulfill the child’s desire for it. On account of its transgressive
content, phase 2 undergoes repression. It is replaced at the level of
consciousness by the third variant, which disguises the identity both
of the person being beaten and of the one administering the punish-
ment. A group of boys now replaces the little girl, and a paternal
representative supplants the father. The fantasizing subject is inscribed
into this scenario as an ambiguous ~ p e c t a t o r . ~ ~
Phases 1 and 3 are ostensibly sadistic. Only phase 2 is unequivocally
masochistic. In a move equivalent in daring to Monsieur D.’s open
concealment of the purloined letter, Freud disarms his critic by ac-
knowledging what might otherwise have been discovered: he admits,

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48 that is, to having fabricated that sequence in the phantasy upon which
he bases his entire interpretation:
This second phase is the most important and the most momentous of
all. But we may say of it in a certain sense that it has never had a real
existence. It is never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming
conscious. It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less of a necessity
on that account. (179-80)
Every time I read this passage, I find myself momentarily paralyzed

by the audacity of the confession, and by the realization that to chal-
lenge Freud’s right to speak in this way for his female patients would
be to place my rhetorical weight on the side of the “real7’ as against
the “constructed,” the “authentic” against the “inauthentic.” Yet,
struggle as I inevitably do against this paralysis, I can find nothing to
dispute in Freud’s account of phase 2, apart from the fact that he finds
what he is looking for in one of his male patient’s case histories. The
change from the active to the passive form of the verb “to beat” can
only have been effected through the mediation of the instinctual vi-
cissitude which is generally described by the phrase “turning around
upon the subject’s own self.” In other words, the transition from phase
1to phase 3 moves the subject from heteroaggression to what appears
to be sadism, and hence from the dimension of simple self-preservation
to that of sexuality. As Laplanche has compellingly argued, that move-
ment necessitates not only the propping of sexuality upon aggression
(i.e., upon the death drive), but the turning around of that sexualized
aggression upon the phantasizing subject’s own self.43 It is only in a
second movement that the now-eroticized aggression can be redirected
outward once again, this time in the form of sadism. I would therefore
agree with Freud that what he identifies as phase 2 is behind phase 3,
and that implicit in the later moment is a masochistic identification
with the beaten children.
At the same time I do not think that phases 2 and 3 can be completely
collapsed, nor that masochism exhausts the latter’s meaning. At the
risk of naivete, I would argue that greater attention should be paid
here to the manifest content of the conscious phantasy, and its sub-
stitution of boys for a girl. The final phase attests to three transgressive
desires, not one of which Freud remarks upon, but which clamor loudly
for my attention: to the desire that it be boys rather than girls who
be loved/disciplined in this way; to the desire to be a boy while being
so treated by the father; and, finally, to the desire to occupy a male
subject-position in some more general sense, but one under the sign
of femininity rather than that of masculinity.
Freud comes close to commenting upon the last of these wishes

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twice, but both times he pulls back from what he is on the verge of 49
discovering. At the end of section IV he observes that
when [girls] turn away from their incestuous love for their father, with its
genital significance, they easily abandon their feminine role. They spur their
“masculinity complex” . . . into activity, and from that point forward only
want to be boys. For that reason the whipping boys who represent them
are boys too. (186)
Here the contradiction between having a “masculinity complex” and
representing oneself as a group of “whipping boys” goes unnoted by
Freud. In a subsequent passage, however, he points out that the girl’s
identification with the male position does not imply an identification
with activity (“[the girl] turns herself in phantasy into a man, without
herself becoming active in the masculine way”), but he draws a sur-
prising conclusion from this new perception. He claims, that is, that
the insertion of “whipping boys” into the scenario marks the extinction
of the girl’s sexuality rather than its reconfiguration (“[she] escapes
from the erotic demands of her life altogether”). He reiterates that
assertion a moment later with the even more puzzling remark that in
the third stage of the beating phantasy the female subject “is no longer
anything but a spectator of the event which takes the place of a sexual
act” (196).
One hardly knows where to begin responding to these two state-
ments. Since when is voyeurism a-sexual? (When it involves girls rather
than boys, women rather than men?) And since when does being an
onlooker in a phantasy preclude a simultaneous identification with the
object of the gaze? Does Freud mean to suggest that the girl “is no
longer anything but a spectator” at the manifest or at the latent level
of her phantasy? He can only mean the manifest level, but that is not
entirely clear from the passage itself, which I will now quote in its
entirety:
.. . the girl escapes from the demands of the erotic side of her life altogether.
She turns herself in phantasy into a man, without herself becoming active
in a masculine way, and is no longer anything but a spectator of the event
which takes the place of a sexual act.
Does the masculine position to which Freud refers involve the whipping
boys, as the first two clauses of the last sentence seem to indicate, or
the spectator, as the final clause seems to suggest? Freud moves in a
very confusing way here between manifest and latent content, retreat-
ing from the latter to the former as the sentence progresses, and in so
doing he deflects attention away from the burning question of what
it might mean, apart from simple disguise, for a female subject to
represent herself in phantasy as a group of passive boys.

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50 The three desires I enumerated above clearly converge around one

thing: a narcissistic investment in a subject-position which it would
be transgressive for a man to occupy, but unthinkable for a woman,
since it implies an identification with male homosexuality. Why should
the second of these options fall so far outside the social pale? Because
even what generally passes for “deviance” is held to a recognizable
and “manageable“ paradigm, i.e., to one that reinforces the binary
logic of gender, despite inverting its logic. Thus when a man doesn’t
identify with the male position, he is expected to identify with the
female one, and vice versa with a woman. The beating phantasy,
however, attests to the desire for imaginary variations that fall outside
the scope of the Freudian model, and whose complexities work to
cancel out masculinity altogether. In the femaleversion of that phantasy
there are only two possible points of narcissistic insertion, and they
both work to redefine male subjectivity: identification with the boys
who are being beatedloved by the father surrogate, and identification
with the figure of the onlooker.
The first of these positions- that of (passive)male homosexuality-
has itself been constituted through identification with the mother, so
that what emerges is a situation in which each sex has access to
femininity through its imaginary alignment with the other, and in which
femininity is thus both radically denatured, and posited as the privi-
leged term. But there is also an ineluctable difference at work in this
extraordinary double identification, since it is clearly not the same
thing, socially or psychically, for the girl to be loveabeaten by the
father as it is for the boy. The girl might be said to seek access to that
difference through her identification with the boy, just as he might be
said to do so through his identification with the mother. Is this not
the beginning of a sexual relation?
The spectatorial inscription also puts masculinity under erasure.
Voyeurism has been heavily coded within western culture as a male
activity, and associated with aggression and sadism. Here, however,
masculinity, aggression and sadism are definitively elsewhere in the
scene, concentrated in the figure of the punishing father-surrogate.
Like the child in the primal scene, the shadowy onlooker is more
mastered than mastering4 The tentativeness with which Freud’s fe-
male patients insert themselves into this position (“I am probably
looking on”) points to the irresolute character of the position itself,
which is less the site of a controlling gaze than a vantage point from
which to see and identify with the whipping boys.
Before leaving the female beating phantasy, I want to note that the
pronoun “I” is conspicuously missing from those parts of it which are
available to consciousness, except in the adumbrative qualification

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about spectatorship, and in fact figures prominently only in that phrase 51

which is “a construction of psychoanalysis”-a detail which attests to
the reticent nature of female masochism, as well as to the force of
repression. This is not at all the case with the male sequence, all three
of whose phases, including the conscious one, begin with the assertion
of pronominal possession:
Phase 1: I am being loved by my father.
Phase 2: I am being beaten by my father.
Phase 3: I am being beaten by my mother.
The beating fantasies confided to Freud by his male patients have

also been subjected to far less censorship and distortion than those
recorded by his female patients. The only significant difference between
the conscious scenario (phase 3) and the unconscious scenario (phase
2 ) bears upon the identity of the person administering the punishment;
the conscious phantasy translates into the verbal formula “I am being
beaten by my mother,” whereas the unconscious one reads “I am being
beaten by my father.” Even this disguise is lightly worn, since the
beating woman manifests such aggressively masculine qualities as to
unmistakably resemble the paternal figure she replaces. (Phase 1,which
is presumed to lie concealed behind phase 2, is not available to con-
scio~sness.)~~
Finally, although some effort is made to conceal the homosexual
content of the conscious phantasy, no corresponding attempt is made
to hide its masochistic content; the two male patients discussed by
Freud, like those cited by Krafft-Ebing, Reik and Deleuze, openly
“flaunt” their desire for punishment and degradation both within their
conscious fantasies and within their sexual practices. (In the conscious
fantasies of the four female patients, on the other hand, masochism
is concealed behind sadism, even though it is more compatible with
their cultural position.) We clearly have an extreme instance here of
what Reik calls the “demonstrative factor.”
What is it precisely that the male masochist displays, and what are
the consequences of this self-exposure? To begin with, he acts out in
an insistent and exaggerated way the basic conditions of cultural sub-
jectivity, conditions that are normally disavowed; he loudly proclaims
that his meaning comes to him from the Other, prostrates himself
before the Gaze even as he solicits it, exhibits his castration for all to
see, and revels in the sacrificial basis of the social contract. The male
masochist magnifies the losses and divisions upon which cultural iden-
tity is based, refusing to be sutured or recompensed. In short, he radiates
a negativity inimical to the social order.
All of this is spectacularly visible in one of the more highly elaborated

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of the male phantasies included in Masochism in Sex and Society. The

phantasy in question was told to Reik by a thirty-seven-year-old (mar-
ried) man, who depended upon it for his sexual potency:
To an ancient barbaric idol, somewhat like the Phoenician Moloch, a
number of vigorous young men are to be sacrificed at certain not too
frequent intervals. They are undressed and laid on the altar one by one.
The rumble of drums is joined by the songs of the approaching temple
choirs. The high priest followed by his suite approaches the altar and
scrutinizes each of the victims with a critical eye. They must satisfy certain
requirements of beauty and athletic appearance. The high priest takes the
genital of each prospective victim in his hand and carefully tests its weight
and form. If he does not approve of the genital, the young man will be
rejected as obnoxious to the god and unworthy of being sacrificed. The
high priest gives the order for the execution and the ceremony continues.
With a sharp cut the young man’s genitals and the surrounding parts are
cut away.46
Unlike the male masochists Freud discusses in “A Child Is Being
Beaten,” the author of this phantasy is not its overt “star.” However,
he is bound to the scenario through a complex imaginary network.
His immediate point of insertion occurs via the young man who will
be next to fall victim to the priest’s knife, but that figure himself
identifies closely with the victim presently suffering that mutilation.
(Reik writes that “the patient shares every intensive affect of this victim,
feels his terror and anxiety with all the physical sensations since he
imagines that he will himself experience the same fate in a few mo-
m e n t ~[42]
~ ~.) This peculiar identificatory “relay” compounds the spe-
cularity of the scene, making it possible for the prospective victim ,(and
so for the phantasizing subject himself) to see how he will be seen
when the weapon falls on his genitals. It speaks not only to the “de-
monstrative feature” of masochism -to the premium it places upon
self-display-but to the “I saw myself seeing myself” of classic fem-
ir~inity,~’and to the mirror staging that underpins all subjectivity.
Not only does the male masochist occupy the position of a “woman”
in his sexual life, but he is one at the level of his c ~ m ~ iFreud
. 7 7 is very
emphatic about this point in “A Child Is Being Beaten”; he writes
there that femininity assumes the status of a “subjective position77for
the male masochist, thereby testifying to the determining influence
exercised by sexual fantasies and practices over social identity. Indeed,
like “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” this essay reserves the
quality of femininity for masochistic men rather than for their female
counterparts. Near the end of “A Child Is Being Beaten” Freud notes
that the phantasy of corporal punishment manifests itself only in “un-

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manly boys” and “unwomanly girls,” and that it is “a trait of femininity 53

in the boys and of masculinity in the girl which must be made re-
sponsible” (199).All of this is another way of saying once again that
feminine masochism is a male pathology.
What is of course most immediately striking about what Reik des-
ignates the “Moloch phantasy” is the literalness with which it enacts
the “theme” of castration, the way it grounds what is normally a
symbolic event at the level of the body. Once again the reader is
reminded both of the terms under which the female subject enters
representation, marked by the stigmata of a corporeal lack, and of the
“pound of flesh” which is the price each of us must pay for our access
to language. But even more is “at stake” in this sacrificial drama; the
stipulation that each victim must conform to the phallic ideal means
that what is really being defaced or disfigured in this phantasy is the
paternal imago, and that what is cut off and thrown away is the phallic
legacy.
So far I have mentioned only one part of the Moloch phantasy. Later
in Masochism in Sex and Society Reik describes the dramatic sequel
to the dismemberment: the castrated victims are placed on a red-hot
grate until they are properly singed, and then dropped into the fire
beneath (61-63). In this phantasy nothing is salvaged, and nothing is
redeemed. It is a narrative of the darkest negativity and loss.
The Moloch phantasy plays with suspense in a number of complex
ways. First, there is the thrillingly terrifying anticipation built into a
situation where the subject imagines himself the second person in line
to suffer various atrocities, and must first watch what will later happen
to himself. Then there is a narrative structure which works to defeat
the apparent climax of castration by making that event only the pro-
logue to even more profound sufferings. Suspense is literalized through
the grate device, which dangles the victims over the engulfing fire, and
further incorporated as a dramatic device through the mandate that
they be adequately singed before being dropped into the flames. The
key question at this juncture-a question which pushes the suspense
to almost an unbearable level of intensity-is whether the victims will
be able to sustain the pain, and remain on the grate until they are
ceremonially ejected, or whether they will fling themselves onto the
fire instead so as to achieve a quick death. A variation which is some-
times built into the middle of the phantasy further compounds the
fearful tension: two of the prisoners are obliged to tend the fire which
will subsequently consume them.
The “authory7of the Moloch phantasy coordinates it with coitus;
provided that the ‘csynchronization” works, ejaculation occurs at the

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54 precise moment that the suspense becomes unbearable, and the victim
with whom he identifies finally surrenders himself or is subjected to
death. Like the other feminine masochists discussed by Reik, this pa-
tient seems to increase the psychic tension until there is a veritable
physiological explosion. Representation fails immediately prior to this
explosion, a point to which I will return in a moment. First I want to
note that this dramatic escalation of anxiety and apprehension violates
Freud’s notion of the pleasure principle fully as much as does the actual
implementation of sexual or religious torture, suggesting once again
the shortcomings of any theoretical account of pleasure which stresses
constancy over rupture, and coherence over “shattering.” (It is no
wonder that the patients whom Reik actually managed to “cure”
complained to him afterwards that life had lost all its color and intensity
[378].) The elaborate preparations which make up the early stages of
the Moloch phantasy and the seemingly interminable delay in reaching
a conclusion produce an erotic narrative which conforms closely to
Freud’s definition of perversion; here as there, libidinal interest extends
far beyond “the regions of the body which are designated for sexual
union,” and the “path” leading toward “the final sexual aim” is tra-
versed far from quickly. Moreover, although ejaculation does occur,
there is no representation of it within the phantasy, which always ends
immediately prior to that event. (This is regularly the case with the
masochistic fantasies Reik describes, as well as the masochistic prac-
tices Krafft-Ebing enumerates; there seems to be no place within either
script for the ostensible goal of all foreplay.) The male genitals do
figure prominently here, but not at the grand finale; that part of the
phantasy which is given over to their inspection and excision occurs
around the middle, and constitutes at most a “false climax.” Thus the
Moloch narrative does more than linger over “the intermediate rela-
tions to the sexual object”; it actually relegates castration to the status
of fore-play.
In pondering the relevance of Freud’s definition of perversion to the
Moloch phantasy, or for that matter to any of the other sexual fantasies
included in Masochism in Sex and Society, one cannot help but notice
that the individual producing the phantasy is his “own” sexual object-
that the body over which he lingers belongs to himself (or his imaginary
twin). Feminine masochism would thus seem to evince the same quality
of auto-eroticism-the same reflexivity and close economy-as moral
masochism. Indeed, the masochistic pervert might almost be said to
beat himself. Even when another person is installed in the punitive
position, as is the case in the novels of Sacher-Masoch, or many of
the cases cited by Krafft-Ebing, the masochist establishes the conditions

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under which the punishment takes place. He thus functions simulta- 55

neously as the speaking or enunciating subject, and as the object of
the discourse or enunciation-a very extreme discursive split out of
which to operate psychically and erotically.
However, even as I stress this “agency” of sorts, I feel impelled to
stress that if the feminine masochist is able to dictate the terms of his
own humiliation that is because they have already been culturally
dictated to him. Here as elsewhere, perversion reflects what it under-
mines; by projecting a cruel or imperious authority before whom he
abases himself, the masochist only acts out in an exaggerated, an-
thropomorphic and hence disruptive way the process whereby subjects
are culturally spoken.
The propensity for impersonation is even more marked in feminine
masochism than it is in moral (or at least Christian) masochism, which
is not surprising given that it is centrally concerned with subject po-
sitioning and gender “roles.” We have already looked closely at one
quite flamboyant mental masquerade, a masquerade which changes
its “author’s” age, his historical moment and his national identity, as
well as the circumstances of his life (and death). The creator of the
Moloch phantasy generates other identities for himself as well, in-
cluding one where he is a Portuguese prisoner of the Aztecs who is
first forced to watch a number of other men be skinned alive, and is
then subjected to the same fate. Krafft-Ebing recounts numerous cases
of male masochists who act out the part of a slave or a page, and
others where the preferred role is that of a dog, a horse, a slaughter
animal, a count, a surface (such as a floor) on which women walk,
and a receptacle for urine, excrement, and menstrual blood. The “hero”
of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs assumes the disguise of a servant
for much of that novel, and-near the end-that of a
The sexual practitioners of feminine masochism generally extend
the masquerade to include the person inflicting the pain or humiliation
as well, and indeed the entire “scene” of the erotic adventure, in effect
remaking the world. This heterocosmic impulse is particularly pro-
nounced in the Moloch and Aztec scenarios to which I referred above,
which relocate the fantasizing subject in another time and place al-
together. It is also strikingly evident in Venus in Furs, where Severin
and Wanda actually leave the country in which they are living for one
in which they will be better able to impersonate mistress and slave.
The crucial question to ask here is whether the heterocosmic impulse
exhausts itself altogether in the boudoir, or whether the “play” spills
over into social intercourse as well, contaminating the proprieties of
gender, class and race.49 I offered a tentative and partial answer to

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56 this question above, when I suggested that the most important and
pervasive of all the pads assumed by the feminine masochist-that of
c6woman77 -can come to assume the reality of a ‘(subjectivecondition.”
The moment has come to do more than refer in passing to Deleuze’s

extremely interesting study of masochism, with which the present essay
has a good deal of sympathy. Deleuze argues that masochism is entirely
an affair between son and mother, or to be more precise between the
male masochist and a cold, maternal and severe mother whom he
designates the “oral mother.” Through the dispassionate and highly
ritualized transaction that takes place between these two figures, the
former is stripped of all virility, and reborn as a “new, sexless man,”
and the latter is invested with the phallus. (Although the mother as-
sumes a dominant position within this scenario, Deleuze stresses that
she is “formed” by the son [21].) What is beaten in masochism is
consequently not so much the male subject as the father, or the father
in the male subject. Masochism works insistently to negate paternal
power and privilege:
A contract is established between the hero and the woman, whereby at a
precise point in time and for a determinate period she is given every right
over him. By this means the masochist tries to exorcise the danger of the
father and to ensure that the temporal order of reality and experience will
be in conformity with the symbolic order, in which the father has been
abolished for all time. Through the contract . . . the masochist reaches
towards the most mythical and timeless realms, where [the mother] dwells.
Finally, he ensures that he will be beaten. . . . what is beaten, humiliated
and ridiculed in him is the image and likeness of the father, and the pos-
sibility of the father’s aggressive return. . . . The masochist thus liberates
himself in preparation for a rebirth in which the father will have no part.
(58)
This argument is one of several “utopian” rereadings of masochism
(Bersani’s is another, and Gayle Rubin’s non-theoretical account a
third),50 of which the obvious danger is that they be taken literally,
as designating the standard form of that perversion, rather than as a
subversion or radical reconfiguration of it. It is crucial to grasp that
although Deleuze does in fact claim that masochism has nothing to
do with the father, he obviously knows full well that this is not the
case. His account of that libidinal infraction cannot be understood
apart from the mechanism of disavowal, which he not only places at
the center of its organization, but himself deploys throughout his study
whenever he refuses to acknowledge the place of the father within
masochism. In a key passage, Deleuze asserts that masochism “pro-

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ceeds from a twofold disavowal, a positive idealizing disavowal of the 57

mother (who is identified with the law), and an invalidating disavowal
of the father (who is expelled from the symbolic order)’’ (60). He
thereby clearly indicates that within the masochism about which he
speaks paternal power and law are present only negatively, through
their repudiation- that the masochism he celebrates is a pact between
mother and son to write the father out of his dominant position within
both culture and masochism, and to install the mother in his place.
The contract between Wanda and Severin is one dramatization of
that erasing icriture, but Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness
and Cruelty is itself another. The fact that both Deleuze and his male
masochist are so busy disavowing the father’s phallus and the mother’s
lack clearly indicates that both inhabit an Oedipal universe which only
the force of a radically heterocosmic imagination can unmake, and
not -as one recent writer suggests-a preoedipal realm from which
all masochism Deleuze himself tells us all this in a brilliant
account of disavowal and fetishism:
Disavowal should perhaps be understood as the point of departure of an
operation that consists neither in negating nor even destroying, but rather
in radically contesting the validity of that which is: it suspends belief in
and neutralizes the given in such a way that a new horizon opens up beyond
the given and in place of it. . . . fetishism is first of all a disavowal (“No,
the woman does not lack a penis”); secondly it is a defensive neutralization
(since, contrary to what happens within negation, the knowledge of the
situation as it is persists, but in a suspended, neutralized form); in the third
place it is a protective and idealizing neutralization (for the belief in a
female phallus is itself experienced as a protest of the ideal against the real;
it remains suspended or neutralized in the ideal, the better to shield itself
against the painful awareness of reality). (28-29)
Deleuze thus makes it possible for us to see that the role of the
mother within the conscious fantasies of Freud’s two male patients
may be more than that of a paternal substitute or stand-in, and more
even than the imago in which the feminine masochist sees himself. In
inviting the mother to beat and/or dominate him, he transfers power
and authority from the father to her, remakes the symbolic order, and
“ruins” his own paternal legacy. And that is not all. As Freud remarks
of those two patients in “A Child Is Being Beaten,’’ the conscious
phantasy of being disciplined by the mother “has for its content a
feminine attitude without a homosexual object-choice” (196). It
thereby effects another revolution of sorts, and one whose conse-
quences may be even more socially transforming than eroticism be-
tween men -it constitutes a “feminine” yet heterosexual male subject.

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58 Freud makes the astonishing observation in “A Child Is Being Beaten”

that there is no trace within the.masochistic unconscious, whether male
or female, of the wish to be loved by the father-of the taboo desire
from which the entire condition of masochism ostensibly derives. In
regressing back to the anal stage of sexuality, the masochist apparently
manages to erase ail record of that variant of Oedipal genitality which
is generally held to be positive for the girl, and negative for the boy:
Whatever is repressed from consciousness or replaced in it by something
else remains intact and potentially operative in the unconscious. The effect
of regression to an earlier stage of the sexual organization is quite a different
matter. As regards this we are led to believe that the state of things changes
in the unconscious as well: that in both sexes the masochistic phantasy of
being beaten by the father, though not the passive phantasy of being loved
by him, lives on in the unconscious after repression has taken place. (196)
If Freud is to be believed on this point, male masochism constitutes a

veritable hermeneutic scandal. The passage I have just quoted suggests
that the first phase of the male beating phantasy (“I am being loved
by my father”) is entirely a construction of psychoanalysis, and in a
much more extreme sense than the second stage of the female sequence
can be said to be. It also suggests that the unconscious significance of
the phantasy is entirely exhausted by phase 2, which as I have already
noted differs from phase 3 only with respect to the gender of the person
administering the punishment. Here there is no radical divide of man-
ifest from latent content, and no real ‘‘depth” to the psyche. The door
to the unconscious need not be picked; it is already slightly ajar, and
ready to yield at the slightest pressure.
There are other implications as well. If no record can be found within
his unconscious of the desire to be loved by the father, the male
masochist cannot be reconciled to the symbolic order or to his social
identity through the revelation that his unconscious is already on the
side of harmony and alliance. Indeed, his (barely) repressed desire runs
directly counter to any such reconciliation, attesting irrefutably to the
violence of the familial and cultural contract. His sexuality, moreover,
must be seen to be entirely under the sway of the death drive, devoid
of any possible productivity or use value. It is no wonder that Freud
pulls back from promising a psychoanalytic “cure” in the case of the
feminine masochist (193).
Throughout this essay I have focused almost obsessively upon the

masochistic male subject, whether moral or feminine. Why this single-
minded insistence upon the disruptions effected within subjectivity and
the symbolic by the male variants of that pathology, with only the

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most fleeting of glances in the direction of the female subject? I have 59

been pursuing a political agenda of sorts, an agenda that valorizes the
gains to be achieved by bringing the male subject face to face with his
desire for the father, as well as with the passivity and masochism that
are both a part of this “normalcy,” and a path leading elsewhere.
However, there are additional reasons for my general silence on the
topic of masochism in women-reasons having more to do with the
conditions it assumes there than with the vicissitudes of male subjec-
tivity. The difficulty with conceptualizing that psychic condition as in
any way potentially deviant or perverse is that it represents such a
logical extension of those desires which are assumed to be “natural”
for the female subject. Because there is so little cultural resistance to
it, it does not generally assume any of the poetic or narrative complexity
of pathological male masochism, nor manifest as marked a hetero-
cosmic impulse. Nor does it usually threaten anything but its victim’s
capacities and health, failing for the most part to put power and
privilege at risk. It is presumably for these reasons that so few of the
examples of that perversion which are deemed worthy of “medical”
attention involve women.
At the same time, I would argue, some very unorthodox desires and
patterns of identification can be concealed behind what may often be
only a masquerade of submission, including ones which are quite
incompatible with a subordinate position. There may even be occasions
on which a woman’s masochistic fantasies and sexual practices chal-
lenge gender, as I have already shown, or heterosexuality, class, or
race. Let us see what we can learn from the case histories included in
Psychopathia Sexualis under the heading “Masochism in Women.”
Although the three cases found there have at first glance none of
the invention or thrilling cruelty of many of the male examples, on
closer inspection all three can be seen to threaten more than propriety.
In one instance slaves govern a free woman, as Francis Bacon would
put it. In two of them women consort with women, and in the third
men are seen to do the same. All three either displace heterosexuality,
or foreclose upon it altogether. I will briefly discuss two of the three-
Cases 84 and 86-in closing.
Case 86 involves a woman who pays regular visits to the medical
assistants at the General Hospital of Vienna in order to persuade each
of them to give her a gynecological examination. She stipulates the
terms of that examination in the form of an advance verbal contract:
she will resist, but the doctor must nevertheless continue his “inves-
tigation” to the end. Krafft-Ebing tells us that these gynecological
penetrations afford her not only intense sexual excitement, but deep
orgasms. What is an ordinary but nonetheless humiliating and at times

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60 painful experience for most women thus becomes the vehicle for an
extreme and highly irregular pleasure -one inimical, moreover, to the
medical establishment.
Although the woman in Case 86 manifests not the slightest interest
in transcending the role of patient, she completely redefines that role
by initiating and controlling all exchanges with the doctors, and by
subordinating medicine’s discursive ends to her own libidinal economy.
She also foregrounds to a culturally intolerable degree the erotic basis
of the doctor/patient relationship. Not surprisingly, the medical as-
sistants attempt to contain the disruption and to normalize the situation
by offering either to sleep with the woman, or to pay her for her visits
(i.e., either to substitute heterosexual coitus for perversion, or to clas-
sify her as a prostitute, and so subordinate her to male desire). How-
ever, she refuses both propositions, preferring the speculum to the
penis, and pleasure to profit ( 180-1 8 1).
Case 84 involves a series of beating fantasies which have their in-
ception in an actual whipping situation, and so seems to conform more
closely to the Freudian paradigm than does the previous one. However,
the earliest of these phantasies feature female rather than male dis-
ciplinarians, specifying in certain situations that the beating be per-
formed by a “severe schoolmistress,” and in others by the “brutal,
uneducated female warders” of a mental institution. The first of these
figures obviously derives from classroom experience, but the evolution
of the second is rather more complex and interesting. Miss X, as Krafft-
Ebing calls her, comes across the inspiration for it in a story about
the abuse of mental patients, but in weaving her phantasy she changes
the figure of the abuser from the male director of the asylum to a
cluster of female subordinates. This alteration, which involves gender,
class and number, is motivated at the manifest level by the phantasizing
subject’s desire for a more complete degradation (as we will see in a
moment, Miss X has some very definite views about sexual difference);
to be beaten by a group of “rough” and “ignorant” working class
women is-for her-to sink infinitely lower in the general scheme of
things than to be beaten by an educated middle class man. Otherwise
the identity of the person administering the punishment seems a matter
of complete indifference to her, at least consciously; indeed, at times
she pictures only a disembodied hand hitting her. Krafft-Ebing also
indicates that merely to hear the words “rattan cane” or ‘‘to whip”
is enough to arouse Miss X. Here the closed economy of masochism
doesn’t even seem spacious enough to admit of a second person, a
constriction which is also implied in a way by the title of the essay
“A Child Is Being Beaten.” The punishment performs itself, as it were,
independently of any human agency. (This has radical implications,

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at least assuming that there is any continuity between manifest and 61

latent content. It suggests the possibility that the father may at times
occupy a less than exalted position within the unconscious phantas-
matic, functioning there more as an implement of torture than as the
auratic master of ceremonies. Once again we are reminded that the
masochist is her own libidinal object.)
At the same time, the substitution of a female for a male disciplinarian
cannot be without erotic significance, particularly given some of the
later developments in this phantasy, which eventually come to revolve
around male homosexuality. Miss X permits us to visualize an entirely
different combinatoire than any conceived by Freud’s patients -one
based upon the negative rather than the positive version of the female
Oedipus complex. What is thereby dramatized is once again the shift
of power and authority from the father to the mother, a shift which
is doubly subversive when the mother assumes the identity of the
masses, figured in the guise of the “brutal” and “uneducated’’ women
warders.
Whether this scenario attests to an unconscious desire to be beaten/
loved by the mother and the working classes, or functions merely as
a conscious disguise of another, hidden meaning does not make as
much difference as Freud would have us believe, since the two “levels”
of the phantasy exercise a mutually structuring influence. The manifest
permutations, in other words, are capable of altering the latent phan-
tasmatic in certain ways, just as the latter helps to determine the former.
It is not merely that to assume otherwise is to attribute a transcendental
status to unconscious desire, and to bracket history altogether, but
that Freud himself acknowledges as much at one point in “A Child Is
Being Beaten,” when he remarks that “The boy evades his homosex-
uality by repressing and remodelling [my emphasis] his unconscious
phantasy” (196). Since sexual activities are governed by erotic fan-
tasies, the latter also exercise a less than negligible effect upon material
practice.
It is not until Miss X’s phantasy reforms itself around the figure of
a man that it undergoes any romantic elaboration, a detail which points
to the much greater conventionality and social acceptability of the new
tableau. Although the scene keeps shifting, the basic premise remains
the same: she is beatedloved by a domineering man. However, in the
most heavily elaborated of all these scenarios Miss X also imagines
herself to be a man-a sex-change operation which warrants a closer
look:
. . . I have imagined that he was Robinson and I the savage that served
him. I often look at the pictures in which Robinson puts his foot at the
neck of the savage. I find an explanation of these strange fancies: I look

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62 upon woman in general as low, far below man; but I am otherwise quite
proud and indomitable, whence it arises that I think as a man (who is by
nature proud and superior). This renders my humiliation before the man
I love the more intense. I have also fancied myself to be his female slave;
but this does not suffice, for after all every woman can be the slave of her
husband. (179)
This passage points to the basic “dilemma” of female masochism-
to the fact that woman’s position within the symbolic order is already
so subordinate that further degradation changes nothing. It also hints
at what Freud would later suggest, that insofar as female masochism
reaches pathological proportions, becomes a perversion, it necessarily
includes a “masculinity complex.” However, like the girls in “A Child
Is Being Beaten,” Miss X’s “masculinity complex” entails the wish to
be passive and masochistic, rather than the aspiration to be active and
sadistic. It implies the desire for castration or divestiture, a desire which
can only be realized at the site of male subjectivity, because it is there
that the paternal legacy is stored. As in “A Child Is Being Beaten,’’
the female masochist here makes herself into a homosexual man, and
thereby gains access to what Freud would call “femininity”-a con-
dition which, as we have seen, has more to do with male than with
female masochism. In so doing, she sidesteps not only “normalcy,”
but classifiable deviancy.
Because the male subject himself enters into the condition of femi-
ninity only through an identification with the mother -by giving pref-
erence to the maternal over the paternal ego-ideal- this imaginary
network ultimately works to exclude the father. While it is true that
the latter figure is left holding the whip, it is also the case that no one
wants to be in his boots any longer. The male masochist prefers the
masquerade of womanliness to the parade of virility, and he becomes
what he displays himself as being. And although he seems to subor-
dinate himself to the law of the father, that is only because he knows
how to transform punishment into pleasure, and severity into bliss.
He deploys the diversionary tactics of demonstration, suspense and
impersonation against the phallic “truth,” or “right,’7substituting per-
version for the pike-version of exemplary male subjectivity.
Although I have stressed the heterocosmic tendencies of “feminine”
masochism, I do not mean to erect it as the model for a radically
reconstituted male subjectivity. As I have already remarked more than
once, masochism in all of its guises is as much a product of the existing
symbolic order as a reaction against it. This essay is, moreover, less
concerned with articulating new forms of male subjectivity than with
complicating our understanding of the forms which it presently takes.
Male subjectivity is far more heterogeneous and divided than our

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theoretical models would suggest; it cannot be adequately summarized 63

by invoking either the phallus, or the more flexible concept of bisex-
uality. Even normative male subjectivity is constituted through a com-
plex interaction of the negative and the positive Oedipus complexes,
and the conventions sustaining ccnormalcy’7 may exercise far less force
than is generally assumed. Since libidinal deviations always represent
a politic^'^ of sorts, it seems to me that any feminism which is centrally
concerned with sexual difference cannot afford to ignore those which
are charted across the male body or psyche.
NOTES
1. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James

Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962) 16.
2. Freud, Three Essays 15.
3. Because there are so many quotations in this essay that use the “ph”
spelling for fantasy and fantasmatic, the essay will, for consistency, use
phantasy and phantasmatic throughout.
4. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) 28, 30.
5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Pantheon, 1978) 47-48.
6. Semiotext(e) vol. 4, no. 1 (1981).
7. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion (London: Free As-
sociation Books, 1984) 12.
8. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Rivikre and James Stra-
chey (New York: Norton, 1962) 31.
9. See Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cru-
elty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: George Braziller, 1971).
10. See Georges Bataille, “The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade,” in Visions of
Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1 939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985) 91-102, and Literature and Evil,
trans. Alastair Hamilton (New York: Urizen Books, 1973) 83-107.
11. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1976) 15-37, and 123-171.
12. Jane Gallop, Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot,
and Klossowski (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).
13. Obliques nos. 12-13 (1977).
14. See “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” The Standard Edition of the Complete

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64 Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London:

Hogarth Press, 1953), Vol. XXI: 179, and “The Economic Problem of
Masochism,” The Standard Edition, Vol. XIX: 166.
15. Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism” 161.
16. See, for instance, “Histoire d’O: The Story of a Disciplined and Punished
Body,” Enclitic vol. 7, no. 2 (1983): 63-81; “Changing the Fantasmatic
Scene,” Framework no. 20 (1983): 27-36; “Male Subjectivity and the
Celestial Suture: It’s A Wonderful Life,” Framework no. 14 (1981): 16-
21; and “Masochism and Subjectivity,” Framework no. 12 (1980):2-9.
19. See The Interpretation of Dreams, The Standard Edition, Vol. V: 541;
The Ego and the Id, Vol. XIV; and New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-
Analysis, The Standard Edition, Vol. XXII: 78.
20. Freud, The Ego and the Id 16.
21. “A Child Is Being Beaten,” in Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud, trans.
James and Alix Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1924) 172-201.
22. The most crucial of Freud’s qualifications on this point of course is central
to the present discussion- the qualification that whereas “femininity”
may indeed imply passivity, and in many cases masochism, there is no
necessary connection between “woman” and “femininity.” See Civiliza-
tion and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (London: Norton, 1961)
52ff for an extremely interesting discussion of the slippage between these
last two categories.
23. Richard Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Forensic Study,
trans. Harry E. Wedeck (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1965).
24. Theodor Reik, Masochism in Sex and Society, trans. Margaret H. Beige1
and Gertrud M. Kurth (New York: Grove Press, 1962) 243.
25. “A Child Is Being Beaten” 194-195.
26. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986) 39.
29. In The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(New York: Norton, 1973), J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis suggest that
.
“the subject’s life as a whole . . is seen to be shaped and ordered by
what might be called, in order to stress this structuring action, a ‘phan-
tasmatic’. This should not be conceived of merely as a thematic-not even
as one characterized by distinctly specific traits for each subject-for it
has its own dynamic, in that the fantasy structures seek to express them-

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selves, to find a way out into consciousness and action, and they are 65
constantly drawing in new material”: 137.
30. Freud, “The Economic Principle of Masochism” 169.
31. See N e w Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, The Standard Edi-
tion, Vol. XXII: 66.
32. Freud, The Ego and the Id 20-24.
35. Freud, The Ego and the Id 24. For an extended discussion of the female
version of the negative Oedipus complex, and its relation to feminism,
see Chapters 4 and 5 of The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psy-
choanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
36. “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” The Standard Edition, Vol. XIV: 128.
37. Reik 358. There are striking similarities between the degradations Reik
here associates with Christian masochism, and those Krafft-Ebbing links
with the sexual perversion of masochism. See, for instance, Cases 80, 81,
82 and 83 in Psychopathia Sexualis.
38. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York:
Norton, 1961) 3.
39. Bersani, The Freudian Body 38-39. This extremely interesting and pro-
vocative book is rendered more than a little problematic by the insistence
with which it traces masochism back to an instinctual level of human life,
and by the continuity it posits between that dimension and culture. Bersani
also conflates sexuality with the instincts in a disquieting way. However,
I am in fundamental agreement with his notion that in extreme forms
masochism can be inimical to the stability of a “healthy” ego, and have
throughout this essay appropriated the word- “shattering” -with which
he designates the effect of the former upon the latter.
41. “A Child Is Being Beaten” 184-85. Later in the essay it becomes clear
that Freud constructs phase 2 of the girl’s beating fantasy by inverting
phase 3 of the boy’s fantasy, a discursive action that points to the asym-
metrical symmetry of the two sequences.
42. For a different account of “A Child Is Being Beaten” in general, and phase
3 of the girl’s fantasy in particular see David Rodowick, “The Difficulty
of Difference,” Wide Angle vol. 15, no. 1 (1982):4-15.
43. See Life and Death in Psychoanalysis 85-126.
44. For a discussion of the primal scene and its implications for male sub-
jectivity, see Kaja Silverman, “Too Earlyfloo Late: Subjectivity and the
Primal Scene in Henry James,” Novel vol. 21, nos. 2-3 (1988).

Camera Obscura
66 45. “A Child Is Being Beaten’’ 195.

46. Reik 41.
47. See Stephen Heath, “Difference,” Screen vol. 19, no. 3 (1978): 51-112
for an extremely interesting discussion of this scopic regime.
48. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, in Deleuze, Masochism 195.
49. Mary Russo has some very thoughtful things to say about the social and
political implications of masquerade in “Female Grotesque: Carnival and
T~~oI-Y,” in Critical StudieslFeminist Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloo-
mington: Indiana University Press, 1986) 213-229.
50. See Gayle Rubin, “The Leather Menace: Comments on Politics and
S/M,” for an account of sado-masochism which oscillates curiously be-
tween sociology and advocacy.
51. Gaylyn Studlar conflates Deleuze’s oral mother with the pre-Oedipal
mother of object relations psychoanalysis, and extrapolates from that
conflation a highly dubious argument about the origin of masochism.
According to Studlar, that perversion has its basis in the (male) child’s
relationship with the actual mother prior to the advent of the father, a
relationship predicated upon his helpless subordination to her, and the
insatiability of his desire for her. Masochistic suffering consequently de-
rives from the pain of separation from the mother, and the impossible
desire to fuse with her again, rather than from the categorical imperatives
of the Oedipus complex and the symbolic law. This is a determinedly a-
political reading of masochism, which comes close to grounding that
perversion in biology. (See “Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the
Cinema,” in Movies and Methods Vol. 11, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985) 602-621 .)

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Drawing by a twelve-year-old student

(in Erziehungsflagellantismus, Vienna, 1932)

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What is the OED definition of perversion mentioned?

What is the OED definition of perversion mentioned?

What are the two ways Freud describes perversions according to his account?

What are the two ways Freud describes perversions according to his account?

Camera Obscura

The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (Mantegna)

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