Iris Murdoch and Theodor Reik: Sado-Masochism in The Black Prince

Abstract

The Iris Murdoch Archives in the Special Collections at Kingston University house a well-marked copy of Theodor Reik’s classic psychoanalytic study of 1941, Masochism in Modern Man.¹ Murdoch’s 1957 edition contains both marginal notes and a page of end notes which evidence her keen interest in the topic, and a seeming approval of several of Reik’s observations and conclusions. Reik (1888–1969) was one of the first and most loyal of Freud’s students and a prolific author. He spent 28 years with Freud, before emigrating from Germany to Holland in 1934 and from there to the United States in 1938. Like Murdoch, Reik was extremely interested in sado-masochism: his earliest published work, which was his dissertation, focused on Gustave Flaubert, whose novel The Temptations of Saint Anthony (1874) Reik described as a book concerned with ‘the ascetic writer and his work picturing the psychic crisis of a saint’ (Masochism, p. 5). Reik assures us that his interest in masochism remained constant over the 30 years between the publication of his dissertation and that of Masochism in Modern Man (in its German version Aus Leiden Freuden — literally, Joy from Suffering) in 1940. Both Reik and Murdoch, following Freud, viewed sadism and masochism as two sides of one coin, though others, for example Gilles Deleuze, did not, especially in regard to the etiology of the aberrations.²