Religion and the theory of masochism

The various aspects of masochistic personality structures provide a useful model for examining familiar elements of ordinary religious life. Overall theories of masochism can be divided into six general categories which trace masochism to 1) a distortion of love, 2) a need for punishment, 3) a payment for future rewards, 4) a strategy of the weak or powerless, 5) a flight from selfhood, or 6) an effort to be an object for others. In each case, religious analogies can be found exhibiting the same dynamics. Thus, certain religious phenomena may provide cultural or collective responses to the psychological needs at the root of masochism.240     

Castration

Castration is not a metaphor within the array of psychoanalytic theories, but a pathological belief operative in the unconscious, which originated during the period of childhood sexuality. Of the two major anxieties, separation and castration, castration anxiety is the most overlooked in clinical discourse and theoretical awareness. Castration conflicts have a developmental history and are composed of phases as much as separation-individuation is. These extend from the preoedipal to the oedipal years and beyond and, as separation conflicts, persist throughout life. Clinical material is demonstrated from across the diagnostic spectrum and all developmental levels. Phylogenetic studies are corroborative. As loss of love is a wider derivative of separation anxiety, castration anxiety radiates out to wider fears of invasion and injury to the body. The transference neurosis is more attuned to encompass separation than castration conflicts. This stratum of psychopathology makes reconstruction and the recovery of historical data indispensable.     

Some relations between the negative Oedipus complex and aggression in the male

The conflictual problems that accompany the Oedipus complex, in both its positive and negative (normal and inverted) forms, have long been recognized. It has also been well established that normal and pathological identifications derive from bisexual tendencies and from the complications of early life experiences that reinforce love or hate toward father and mother respectively. In the male, two mechanisms that can operate to bring about a predominant feminine identification and hence a negative or inverted Oedipus complex have been described. First, there is that of a primary identification with the mother, and the seeking of the father as object, with castration anxiety as a consequence. Alternatively, the sequence has been considered to involve positive oedipal wishes with mother as object; accompanying castration anxiety based on expectation of punishment; submission in a negative oedipal position as an attempted defense, only serving, however, to reinforce castration anxiety; and ultimately, a reversion to reactive aggression against the father. The links between unconscious homosexuality and paranoia in light of the foregoing dynamics have been indicated. The influence of preoedipal experience has long been presumed, though not systematically traced. With the advance of understanding of the earliest phases of childhood development, further clarification has become possible. Several factors are discussed in this paper, with illustrative clinical material. Included are the parental roles in perpetuating infantile conflicts of each libidinal phase, and in progression from symbiosis to successful separation-individuation. The resultant difficulties in ego development and in the establishment of mature object relations are described. The subsequent problems in mastering the tasks of the oedipal phase are detailed, showing the effects in terms of alternating positive and negative oedipal strivings. The adolescent-phase struggles are touched on, including the unrealistic ego-ideal structuring based on the negative oedipal stresses. Finally, the relation between unconscious homosexuality, beating fantasies, and paranoia is discussed, with the implications regarding aggression and its effects on psychopathology.     

Separation-Individuation Issues and Castration Anxiety: Their Curious Influence on the Epigenesis of Myopia

This author suggests that myopia is related to psychogenic factors involving an unconscious representation of, and defense against tension. Further, the argument is made that such tension directly causes the extra-ocular muscles of the eyeball to tighten, ultimately creating the errors of refraction, which define the condition known as myopia. The author makes the case that the specific nature of the tension has to do with an interruption in the separation–individuation process that has occurred, in which the myopic individual experiences separation anxiety, and is now “required” to stay close to the mother for fear of abandonment. Apparently, the only way myopes are then able to achieve some sort of psychological distance is through the development of high-level abstract conceptualization abilities. In addition to separation fears, this author notes that myopes exhibit significantly higher levels of castration anxiety as compared with normal-sighted individuals, matched in IQ. Tables showing empirical findings supporting the above psychoanalytic interpretations are provided for the readers review.     

Das Drama des begabten Kindes und die Suche nach dem wahren Selbst

The clinical material for this study of female fantasies stems from a specific psychoanalytical situation where the analyst and the analysand are pregnant at the same time. The impact of this situation is powerful. The emergence of archaic fantasies is facilitated in transference and countertransference. Fantasies of damage to the baby or to the procreative function may emerge very vividly in the double pregnancy setting and working through these fantasies becomes possible. It is suggested that these fantasies are typical female castration fantasies and manifest the fear of the mother's revenge and punishment for forbidden oedipal wishes. The double pregnancy setting may sensitize the analyst to her pregnant analysand's unconscious communication and yet blind the analyst in some areas to the protection of her own baby. The duality of phallic strivings in the girl's psychosexual development is discussed. They may be employed as a defense against specific feminine anxieties, such as fear of retaliatory attacks on her inner space and its fertility: the female castration anxiety. They may also be constituents of her sexuality, coexisting with inner genital strivings. The co-existence of phallic and inner-genital strivings in the female psyche is always conflictual.     

The observing ego as voyeur

A resistance to self-observation and self-reflection is discussed in which there is a perversion of the observing ego. The observing ego has been unconsciously recruited in the service of enacting an unconscious fantasy: the fantasy of being an excited observer of a primal scene who is punished for making forbidden observations. This voyeuristic observing ego is pathologically enmeshed in a love triangle with the patient's seductive superego (i.e. identification with the desired but unfaithful parent) and with the patient's punitive superego (i.e. identification with the rivalrous parent). This unconscious scenario is played out in the clinical situation as the patient unreflectively cycles through phases of denial (i.e. self-seduction) and moral masochism (i.e. self-betrayal). A case study illustrates how humor may be employed to free the observing ego from being enthralled by a perverse superego. Humor may unconsciously enable a rebellious attitude toward the omnipotent sadism of a perversely oppressive superego and thus enable the observing ego to break free from its pathological enmeshment.     

Individual and institutional defences against primitive anxieties: Counselling in prison

Abstract

This paper describes a counsellor's attempts to understand the unconscious dynamics affecting the process of counselling women in prison. The social system of the prison serves to defend both prisoners and officers against powerful anxieties about the potential for sadistic attack originating from primitive states of mind, that is persecution, helplessness and destructiveness. The implications of the rigid means of defence are considered, and die role of unconscious guilt motivating the need for external punishment is briefly explored. Emphasis is placed on the role of splitting and projection in the management of potentially overwhelming feelings of guilt, and fear of punishment. The author develops the premise that there is in effect an institutional requirement that prisoners remain in the paranoid-schizoid position because of the feared consequences were they to experience depressive anxieties.     

Serializing Masochist Subjectivities: Mapping Intensities from Deleuze’s Masoch to <Emphasis Type="Italic">Macho Sluts</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Fifty Shades of Grey</Emphasis>

In this article, I investigate the masochist practices and relations presented in the Fifty shades trilogy by E.L. James and Macho sluts by Pat Califia through the lenses of Coldness and cruelty—Deleuze’s essay on masochism—as well as the further developments of his thoughts on masochist relations as presented in the texts written with Guattari, expressly Anti-Oedipus (in terms of the development of their thought on the body without organs) and A thousand plateaus (as a further exposition on the BwO, but this time directly related to masochism). In particular, I am interested in the relationship of desire—and also sexual desire—to the capitalist machine, as well as the kinds of masochistic literatures and subsequent practices and affective registers that are produced in such a context. Finally, I begin to look at the affective structures needed by masochistic literatures, relations and practices for fomenting becomings that initiate subjectivities where each series is defined in terms of its haecceity so that subjective desire is not reduced to capitalist production.     

The Castration Complex

ABSTRACT

Theoretical formulations of the castration complex have changed as psychoanalytic theory has developed. The author briefly reviews the literature and asserts that analyzing the set of fantasies related to potential or imagined castration continues to be clinically quite important. Understanding these unconscious fantasies provides a window into the individual's experience of his or her body in relation to those of important others throughout development. A case is provided to illustrate this, and to discuss the ways in which several different ways of thinking about castration fantasies contributed something essential to this analysis.     

Depressive rumination in an analysand after a traumatic treatment

The author attempts to understand the underpinnings of a ruminative depression that occurred in a patient after a troubled first analysis. Negative therapeutic reaction is often assumed to be the result of a patient's unconscious guilt or masochism and thus an intrapsychic phenomenon, but the author asserts that iatrogenic phenomena in the form of persistent misunderstandings and enactments that remain unanalyzed contribute to a destructive treatment experience. The analysand may relive the failed treatment again and again in his or her mind in an attempt to resolve it. The author asserts that a traumatic treatment experience can foster depressive rumination.     

The Little Mermaid: Hans Christian Andersen's Feminine Identification

While verbally transmitted fairy tales express universal human concerns, the literary fairy tale, the written creation of an individual author, permits a psychodynamic understanding of the writer. The little mermaid's willingness to undergo the pain and mutilation involved in the loss of both her tail and was voice in order to become a mortal and marry a prince has been regarded as illustrating problems in female sexual development. However, a review of Hans Christian Andersen's biographical data indicates that the story also represents his unconscious homosexual conflicts and supports Freud's concept of the role of castration anxiety in the negative Oedipus complex.     

Falling off the couch

The patient's therapeutic regression intensifies certain unconscious meanings of the analytic couch. In addition to representing the analysis or the analyst in general, the couch can represent the unconscious, or it may take on the symbolic significance of the analyst's or mother's arms, lap, breasts, or womb. When the genetic roots of the patient's transference include substantial experiences of disappointment, narcissistic injury, and mistrust, the theme of falling from the couch may emerge as a dream, an association, or even an enactment. This theme usually implies the presence of a deepening but mistrustful transference, based on earlier disappointments by the patient's primary objects. Falling off the couch may be associated with being dropped as an infant, rolling out of bed as a child, birth, miscarriage, castration, death, termination, defending against passive wishes, punishment for sexual or aggressive transgressions, escaping an attack, descending into the unconscious, or wanting to be picked up and comforted.     

The Colonized Mind: Gender,Trauma, and Mentalization

The question of how gender and trauma may impact one another is explored through detailed clinical material from the author’s work with a patient contemplating, and then beginning, a transition from female to male. The author explores what happens when a mind is colonized rather than mentalized. The term colonize is used to describe the unconscious use of a child’s mind to store unprocessed trauma from an earlier generation. The author describes destabilizing feelings of uncertainty, shame, and anxiety in both patient and analyst at various points in the treatment.     

A review of Lacan's seminar on anxiety1

The seminar on anxiety marks a turning point in the development of Lacan's thought from several perspectives. First, Lacan implicitly abandons his theory that the unconscious is structured like a language. He also abandons the endeavour to identify Freud's theory with his own. He develops some original new ideas about anxiety, some of which are of great interest, such as the connection between castration anxiety and narcissism; others, such as his denial of the existence of separation anxiety, are absurd. Lacan's main point of divergence from Freud, his rejection of the inner world, also emerges clearly in this seminar.     

A Royal Road to Consequentialism?

To consequentialise a moral theory means to account for moral phenomena usually described in nonconsequentialist terms, such as rights, duties, and virtues, in a consequentialist framework. This paper seeks to show that all moral theories can be consequentialised. The paper distinguishes between different interpretations of the consequentialiser’s thesis, and emphasises the need for a cardinal ranking of acts. The paper also offers a new answer as to why consequentialising moral theories is important: This yields crucial methodological insights about how to pursue ethical inquires.     

THE SEDUCTIVE SUPEREGO: THE TRAUMA OF SELF-BETRAYAL

The author describes a pathological manifestation of the approving superego that functions as a perversely seductive superego. In this process, the seductive superego rationalises and makes ego-syntonic a gratification of forbidden wishes that will result in unconscious punishment. The author argues that the seductive superego torments the self by teasing it with the presence of a tantalising but forbidden object of desire and then by inflicting shame on the self for its timidity, which prevents it from pursuing the object in spite of the dangers. He suggests that the seductive superego inflicts a betrayal trauma upon the self by unconsciously actualising a sado-masochistic fantasy of seduction, surrender and betrayal, along with a humiliating punishment for surrendering.     

Moral Responsibility,Guilt, and Retributivism

This paper defends a minimal desert thesis, according to which someone who is blameworthy for something deserves to feel guilty, to the right extent, at the right time, because of her culpability. The sentiment or emotion of guilt includes a thought that one is blameworthy for something as well as an unpleasant affect. Feeling guilty is not a matter of inflicting suffering on oneself, and it need not involve any thought that one deserves to suffer. The desert of a feeling of guilt is a kind of moral propriety of that response, and it is a matter of justice. If the minimal desert thesis is correct, then it is in some respect good that one who is blameworthy feel guilty—there is some justice in that state of affairs. But if retributivism concerns the justification of punishment, the minimal desert thesis is not retributivist. Its plausibility nevertheless raises doubt about whether, as some have argued, there are senses of moral responsibility that are not desert-entailing.     

道德与关系惩罚对初中生公共物品困境中合作行为的影响

本研究模拟公共物品两难困境范式,以初中生为被试,通过两个实验分别考察道德惩罚和关系惩罚对不同性别和社会价值取向个体合作行为的影响。结果发现:(1)两种惩罚条件下初中生的合作水平均显著高于无惩罚条件,但当惩罚撤除后只有关系惩罚条件下的效应还存在;(2)初中女生在两种惩罚条件下的合作水平均显著高于无惩罚条件,而男生只在关系惩罚条件下出现该情况;(3)亲社会取向与亲自我取向初中生在两种惩罚阶段均表现出更高的合作水平,但在惩罚撤除后,只有亲社会取向者保持了高合作水平。这些结果表明,关系惩罚的作用较为持久,且对男生的影响更为突出,不过两种惩罚在亲社会取向者身上均显现出延后效应。     

Addiction to near death in adolescence

This paper takes Betty Joseph's concept of ‘addiction to near death’, which describes a clinical situation in which sadism and masochism dominate the relationships of a particular group of patients, and applies it specifically to the case material of a girl in adolescent psychotherapy treatment. A link is made between the patient's retreat from mature genital sexuality as she approaches adulthood and the use of sadism and masochism towards this aim. The paper concludes with a discussion on the increase in strength and potency of sadism and masochism in adolescence as contributing to the high risk of destructive and self-destructive behaviour present in this age group.     

Envy: the canker in the bud

This paper explores the relevance of the concept of moral masochism as a response to early trauma and the implications of this for psychotherapy.

Consideration is given to early conceptualisations of moral masochism within the psychoanalytic literature, in particular, the move from drive theory to object relations. More recent developments in relation to trauma and defences, such as disassociation, are explored. It is suggested that a more complex and fuller understanding requires thinking about the subtle and shifting interaction of both these levels. This allows the possibility of building a more nuanced understanding which can look at both behaviour, as described in the trauma literature, and meaning which is the core of a more classical psychoanalytic approach.

Case histories are used to illustrate the linkages between moral masochism and trauma and the transference and countertransference dynamics and challenges involved. Progress varied in these cases, with both positive and negative outcomes. This theoretical background is used to suggest why this may be so.