Survey of Psychological Literature (1926 Onwards)

Summary

The aim of this survey has been to look at as many aspects of the complex phenomenon of masochism as possible, rather than to list as many authors as possible with their dates, ranging them into camps and hanging some conceptual tally over their tents. The process of plucking one idea from a paper or book of many pages, encapsulating it in one sentence and thereby disposing of the work of many weeks or years has always seemed to me an unfair and futile one. Inevitably I have done this too, but I have also attempted to convey the contents of many of the papers considered as thoroughly as possible, with occasional assesssments, and have arranged these synopses in chronological order. Freud’s writings and subsequent commentaries upon them have already been considered in the previous chapter. Here it will therefore be a case of indicating briefly where an author has used and possibly developed some particular aspect of Freud’s views on masochism. It is hoped that the method employed in this survey, though unstandard and unwieldy, may nevertheless achieve its aim of covering most psychological approaches to the problem of masochism published since Freud.