Cynthia Witthoft - The World of Sexual Mediocrity

Cynthia Witthoft - The World of Sexual Mediocrity Album - 1995 - The Libertines' Songs 1 http://cynthiawitthoft.blogspot.com/2008/01/cynthia-witthoft-libertines-songs-1.html Freud made masochism and -- to a lesser degree -- sadism core parts of psychoanalysis. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality he called the tendency to inflict and receive pain during sex "the most common and important of all perversions" (Freud [1905] 1996). He also pointed out that both tendencies commonly occurred in the same individual. Freud changed his theories on the genesis of sadism and masochism repeatedly, first stating that masochism only arose as a form of sadism against the self. He later introduced such concepts as "primary" and "secondary" masochism and sub-forms such as "feminine" and "moral" masochism. He also saw guilt as an important factor and integrated both tendencies into his theory of psychosexual development. Put shortly, they were assumed to be a sign of incomplete or incorrect sexual development in the child. Freud's followers such as Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich and Theodor Reik expanded and modified his ideas, creating new terms and concepts in the process. Elsworth Baker attributed the origin of masochistic character to parental inconsistency. Helene Deutsch postulated that all women are masochistic by nature (Deutsch 1930), reinforcing Krafft-Ebing's and Freud's views. Some theorists claimed that the population of whole countries such as Japan should be considered masochistic in a psychoanalytical sense (Nakakuki 1994). Because of these modifications, even the most basic words such as "masochism" have acquired so many different meanings in psychoanalysis that the terms have become confusing for psychoanalysts themselves and incomprehensible to outsiders (Maleson 1984). Freud's theories on sadomasochism and the philosophy of Sade fascinated thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Simone de Beauvoir. Their writings, though not grounded in formal research and sometimes far removed from real-life sadomasochism, strongly influenced popular views of the subject in the mid-20th century.