The Definition of Sadism--De Sade--Masochism to some Extent
Normal--Sacher-Masoch--No Real Line of Demarcation between Sadism and
Masochism--Algolagnia includes both Groups of Manifestations--The
Love-bite as a Bridge from Normal Phenomena to Algolagnia--The Fascination
of Blood--The Most Extreme Perversions are Linked on to Normal Phenomena.
We thus see that there are here two separate groups of feelings: one, in
the masculine line, which delights in displaying force and often inflicts
pain or the simulacrum of pain; the other, in the feminine line, which
delights in submitting to that force, and even finds pleasure in a slight
amount of pain, or the idea of pain, when associated with the experiences
of love. We see, also, that these two groups of feelings are
complementary. Within the limits consistent with normal and healthy life,
what men are impelled to give women love to receive. So that we need not
unduly deprecate the "cruelty" of men within these limits, nor unduly
commiserate the women who are subjected to it.
Such a conclusion, however, as we have also seen, only holds good within
those normal limits which an attempt has here been made to determine. The
phenomena we have been considering are strictly normal phenomena, having
their basis in the conditions of tumescence and detumescence in animal and
primitive human courtship. At one point, however, when discussing the
phenomena of the love-bite, I referred to the facts which indicate how
this purely normal manifestation yet insensibly passes over into the
region of the morbid. It is an instance that enables us to realize how
even the most terrible and repugnant sexual perversions are still
demonstrably linked on to phenomena that are fundamentally normal. The
love-bite may be said to give us the key to that perverse impulse which
has been commonly called sadism.
There is some difference of opinion as to how "sadism" may be best
defined. Perhaps the simplest and most usual definition is that of
Krafft-Ebing, as sexual emotion associated with the wish to inflict pain
and use violence, or, as he elsewhere expresses it, "the impulse to cruel
and violent treatment of the opposite sex, and the coloring of the idea of
such acts with lustful feeling."[83] A more complete definition is that of
Moll, who describes sadism as a condition in which "the sexual impulse
consists in the tendency to strike, ill-use, and humiliate the beloved
person."[84] This definition has the advantage of bringing in the element
of moral pain. A further extension is made in Féré's definition as "the
need of association of violence and cruelty with sexual enjoyment, such
violence or cruelty not being necessarily exerted by the person himself
who seeks sexual pleasure in this association."[85] Garnier's definition,
while comprising all these points, further allows for the fact that a
certain degree of sadism may be regarded as normal. "Pathological sadism,"
he states, "is an impulsive and obsessing sexual perversion characterized
by a close connection between suffering inflicted or mentally represented
and the sexual orgasm, without this necessary and sufficing condition
frigidity usually remaining absolute."[86] It must be added that these
definitions are very incomplete if by "sadism" we are to understand the
special sexual perversions which are displayed in De Sade's novels. Iwan
Bloch ("Eugen Dühren"), in the course of his book on De Sade, has
attempted a definition strictly on this basis, and, as will be seen, it is
necessary to make it very elaborate: "A connection, whether intentionally
sought or offered by chance, of sexual excitement and sexual enjoyment
with the real or only symbolic (ideal, illusionary) appearance of
frightful and shocking events, destructive occurrences and practices,
which threaten or destroy the life, health, and property of man and other
living creatures, and threaten and interrupt the continuity of inanimate
objects, whereby the person who from such occurrences obtains sexual
enjoyment may either himself be the direct cause, or cause them to take
place by means of other persons, or merely be the spectator, or, finally,
be, voluntarily or involuntarily, the object against which these processes
are directed."[87] This definition of sadism as found in De Sade's works
is thus, more especially by its final clause, a very much wider conception
than the usual definition.
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis De Sade, was born in 1740 at
Paris in the house of the great Condé. He belonged to a very
noble, ancient, and distinguished Provençal family; Petrarch's
Laura, who married a De Sade, was one of his ancestors, and the
family had cultivated both arms and letters with success. He was,
according to Lacroix, "an adorable youth whose delicately pale
and dusky face, lighted up by two large black [according to
another account blue] eyes, already bore the languorous imprint
of the vice which was to corrupt his whole being"; his voice was
"drawling and caressing"; his gait had "a softly feminine grace."
Unfortunately there is no authentic portrait of him. His early
life is sketched in letter iv of his _Aline et Valcourt_. On
leaving the Collège-Louis-le-Grand he became a cavalry officer
and went through the Seven Years' War in Germany. There can be
little doubt that the experiences of his military life, working
on a femininely vicious temperament, had much to do with the
development of his perversion. He appears to have got into
numerous scrapes, of which the details are unknown, and his
father sought to marry him to the daughter of an aristocratic
friend of his own, a noble and amiable girl of 20. It so chanced
that when young De Sade first went to the house of his future
wife only her younger sister, a girl of 13, was at home; with her
he at once fell in love and his love was reciprocated; they were
both musical enthusiasts, and she had a beautiful voice. The
parents insisted on carrying out the original scheme of marriage.
De Sade's wife loved him, and, in spite of everything, served his
interests with Griselda-like devotion; she was, Ginisty remarks,
a saint, a saint of conjugal life; but her love was from the
first only requited with repulsion, contempt, and suspicion.
There were, however, children of the marriage; the career of the
eldest--an estimable young man who went into the army and also
had artistic ability, but otherwise had no community of tastes
with his father--has been sketched by Paul Ginisty, who has also
edited the letters of the Marquise. De Sade's passion for the
younger sister continued (he idealized her as Juliette), though
she was placed in a convent beyond his reach, and at a much later
period he eloped with her and spent perhaps the happiest period
of his life, soon terminated by her death. It is evident that
this unhappy marriage was decisive in determining De Sade's
career; he at once threw himself recklessly into every form of
dissipation, spending his health and his substance sometimes
among refinedly debauched nobles and sometimes among coarsely
debauched lackeys. He was, however, always something of an
artist, something of a student, something of a philosopher, and
at an early period he began to write, apparently at the age of
23. It was at this age, and only a few months after his marriage,
that on account of some excess he was for a time confined in
Vincennes. He was destined to spend 27 years of his life in
prisons, if we include the 13 years which in old age he passed in
the asylum at Charenton. His actual offenses were by no means so
terrible as those he loved to dwell on in imagination, and for
the most part they have been greatly exaggerated. His most
extreme offenses were the indecent and forcible flagellation in
1768 of a young woman, Rosa Keller, who had accosted him in the
street for alms, and whom he induced by false pretenses to come
to his house, and the administration of aphrodisiacal bonbons to
some prostitutes at Marseilles. It is owing to the fact that the
prime of his manhood was spent in prisons that De Sade fell back
on dreaming, study, and novel-writing. Shut out from real life,
he solaced his imagination with the perverted visions--to a very
large extent, however, founded on knowledge of the real facts of
perverted life in his time--which he has recorded in _Justine_
(1781); _Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l'Ecole du Libertinage_
(1785); _Aline et Valcour ou le Roman Philosophique_ (1788);
_Juliette_ (1796); _La Philosophie dans le Boudoir_ (1795). These
books constitute a sort of encyclopedia of sexual perversions, an
eighteenth century _Psychopathia Sexualis_, and embody, at the
same time, a philosophy. He was the first, Bloch remarks, who
realized the immense importance of the sexual question. His
general attitude may be illustrated by the following passage (as
quoted by Lacassagne): "If there are beings in the world whose
acts shock all accepted prejudices, we must not preach at them or
punish them ... because their bizarre tastes no more depend upon
themselves than it depends on you whether you are witty or
stupid, well made or hump-backed.... What would become of your
laws, your morality, your religion, your gallows, your Paradise,
your gods, your hell, if it were shown that such and such
fluids, such fibers, or a certain acridity in the blood, or in
the animal spirits, alone suffice to make a man the object of
your punishments or your rewards?" He was enormously well read,
Bloch points out, and his interest extended to every field of
literature: _belles lettres_, philosophy, theology, politics,
sociology, ethnology, mythology, and history. Perhaps his
favorite reading was travels. He was minutely familiar with the
bible, though his attitude was extremely critical. His favorite
philosopher was Lamettrie, whom he very frequently quotes, and he
had carefully studied Machiavelli.
De Sade had foreseen the Revolution; he was an ardent admirer of
Marat, and at this period he entered into public life as a mild,
gentle, rather bald and gray-haired person. Many scenes of the
Revolution were the embodiment in real life of De Sade's
imagination; such, for instance, were the barbaric tortures
inflicted, at the instigation of Théroigne de Méricourt, on La
Belle Bouquetière. Yet De Sade played a very peaceful part in the
events of that time, chiefly as a philanthropist, spending much
of his time in the hospitals. He saved his parents-in-law from
the scaffold, although they had always been hostile to him, and
by his moderation aroused the suspicions of the revolutionary
party, and was again imprisoned. Later he wrote a pamphlet
against Napoleon, who never forgave him and had him shut up in
Charenton as a lunatic; it was a not unusual method at that time
of disposing of persons whom it was wished to put out of the way,
and, notwithstanding De Sade's organically abnormal temperament,
there is no reason to regard him as actually insane.
Royer-Collard, an eminent alienist of that period, then at the
head of Charenton, declared De Sade to be sane, and his detailed
report is still extant. Other specialists were of the same
opinion. Bloch, who quotes these opinions (_Neue Forschungen_,
etc., p. 370), says that the only possible conclusion is that De
Sade was sane, but neurasthenic, and Eulenburg also concludes
that he cannot be regarded as insane, although he was highly
degenerate. In the asylum he amused himself by organizing a
theater. Lacroix, many years later, questioning old people who
had known him, was surprised to find that even in the memory of
most virtuous and respectable persons he lived merely as an
"_aimable mauvais sujet_." It is noteworthy that De Sade aroused,
in a singular degree, the love and devotion of women,--whether or
not we may regard this as evidence of the fascination exerted on
women by cruelty. Janin remarks that he had seen many pretty
little letters written by young and charming women of the great
world, begging for the release of the "_pauvre marquis_."
Sardou, the dramatist, has stated that in 1855 he visited the
Bicêtre and met an old gardener who had known De Sade during his
reclusion there. He told that one of the marquis's amusements
was to procure baskets of the most beautiful and expensive roses;
he would then sit on a footstool by a dirty streamlet which ran
through the courtyard, and would take the roses, one by one, gaze
at them, smell them with a voluptuous expression, soak them in
the muddy water, and fling them away, laughing as he did so. He
died on the 2d of December, 1814, at the age of 74. He was almost
blind, and had long been a martyr to gout, asthma, and an
affection of the stomach. It was his wish that acorns should be
planted over his grave and his memory effaced. At a later period
his skull was examined by a phrenologist, who found it small and
well formed; "one would take it at first for a woman's head." The
skull belonged to Dr. Londe, but about the middle of the century
it was stolen by a doctor who conveyed it to England, where it
may possibly yet be found. [The foregoing account is mainly
founded on Paul Lacroix, _Revue de Paris_, 1837, and _Curiosités
de l'Histoire de France_, second series, _Procès Célèbres_, p.
225; Janin, _Revue de Paris_, 1834; Eugen Dühren (Iwan Bloch),
_Der Marquis de Sade und Seine Zeit_, third edition, 1901; id.,
_Neue Forschungen über den Marquis de Sade und Seine Zeit_, 1904;
Lacassagne, _Vacher l'Eventreur et les Crimes Sadiques_, 1899;
Paul Ginisty, _La Marquise de Sade_, 1901.]
The attempt to define sadism strictly and penetrate to its roots in De
Sade's personal temperament reveals a certain weakness in the current
conception of this sexual perversion. It is not, as we might infer, both
from the definition usually given and from its probable biological
heredity from primitive times, a perversion due to excessive masculinity.
The strong man is more apt to be tender than cruel, or at all events knows
how to restrain within bounds any impulse to cruelty; the most extreme and
elaborate forms of sadism (putting aside such as are associated with a
considerable degree of imbecility) are more apt to be allied with a
somewhat feminine organization. Montaigne, indeed, observed long ago that
cruelty is usually accompanied by feminine softness.
In the same way it is a mistake to suppose that the very feminine
woman is not capable of sadistic tendencies. Even if we take into
account the primitive animal conditions of combat, the male must
suffer as well as inflict pain, and the female must not only
experience subjection to the male, but also share in the emotions
of her partner's victory over his rivals. As bearing on these
points, I may quote the following remarks written by a lady: "It
is said that, the weaker and more feminine a woman is, the
greater the subjection she likes. I don't think it has anything
at all to do with the general character, but depends entirely on
whether the feeling of constraint and helplessness affects her
sexually. In men I have several times noticed that those who were
most desirous of subjection to the women they loved had, in
ordinary life, very strong and determined characters. I know of
others, too, who with very weak characters are very imperious
toward the women they care for. Among women I have often been
surprised to see how a strong, determined woman will give way to
a man she loves, and how tenacious of her own will may be some
fragile, clinging creature who in daily life seems quite unable
to act on her own responsibility. A certain amount of passivity,
a desire to have their emotions worked on, seems to me, so far as
my small experience goes, very common among ordinary, presumably
normal men. A good deal of stress is laid on femininity as an
attraction in a woman, and this may be so to very strong natures,
but, so far as I have seen, the women who obtain extraordinary
empire over men are those with a certain _virility_ in their
character and passions. If with this virility they combine a
fragility or childishness of appearance which appeals to a man in
another way at the same time, they appear to be irresistible."
I have noted some of the feminine traits in De Sade's temperament
and appearance. The same may often be noted in sadists whose
crimes were very much more serious and brutal than those of De
Sade. A man who stabbed women in the streets at St. Louis was a
waiter with a high-pitched, effeminate voice and boyish
appearance. Reidel, the sadistic murderer, was timid, modest, and
delicate; he was too shy to urinate in the presence of other
people. A sadistic zoöphilist, described by A. Marie, who
attempted to strangle a woman fellow-worker, had always been very
timid, blushed with much facility, could not look even children
in the eyes, or urinate in the presence of another person, or
make sexual advances to women.
Kiernan and Moyer are inclined to connect the modesty and
timidity of sadists with a disgust for normal coitus. They were
called upon to examine an inverted married woman who had
inflicted several hundred wounds, mostly superficial, with forks,
scissors, etc., on the genital organs and other parts of a girl
whom she had adopted from a "Home." This woman was very prominent
in church and social matters in the city in which she lived, so
that many clergymen and local persons of importance testified to
her chaste, modest, and even prudish character; she was found to
be sane at the time of the acts. (Moyer, _Alienist and
Neurologist_, May, 1907, and private letter from Dr. Kiernan.)
We are thus led to another sexual perversion, which is usually considered
the opposite of sadism. Masochism is commonly regarded as a peculiarly
feminine sexual perversion, in women, indeed, as normal in some degree,
and in man as a sort of inversion of the normal masculine emotional
attitude, but this view of the matter is not altogether justified, for
definite and pronounced masochism seems to be much rarer in women than
sadism.[88] Krafft-Ebing, whose treatment of this phenomenon is, perhaps,
his most valuable and original contribution to sexual psychology, has
dealt very fully with the matter and brought forward many cases. He thus
defines this perversion: "By masochism I understand a peculiar perversion
of the psychical _vita sexualis_ in which the individual affected, in
sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely
and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex,
of being treated by this person as by a master, humiliated and abused.
This idea is colored by sexual feeling; the masochist lives in fancies in
which he creates situations of this kind, and he often attempts to realize
them."[89]
In a minor degree, not amounting to a complete perversion of the sexual
instinct, this sentiment of abnegation, the desire to be even physically
subjected to the adored woman, cannot be regarded as abnormal. More than
two centuries before Krafft-Ebing appeared, Robert Burton, who was no mean
psychologist, dilated on the fact that love is a kind of slavery. "They
are commonly slaves," he wrote of lovers, "captives, voluntary servants;
_amator amicæ mancipium_, as Castilio terms him; his mistress's servant,
her drudge, prisoner, bondman, what not?"[90] Before Burton's time the
legend of the erotic servitude of Aristotle was widely spread in Europe,
and pictures exist of the venerable philosopher on all fours ridden by a
woman with a whip.[91] In classic times various masochistic phenomena are
noted with approval by Ovid. It has been pointed out by Moll[92] that
there are traces of masochistic feeling in some of Goethe's poems,
especially "Lilis Park" and "Erwin und Elmire." Similar traces have been
found in the poems of Heine, Platen, Hamerling, and many other poets.[93]
The poetry of the people is also said to contain many such traces. It may,
indeed, be said that passion in its more lyric exaltations almost
necessarily involves some resort to masochistic expression. A popular lady
novelist in a novel written many years ago represents her hero, a robust
soldier, imploring the lady of his love, in a moment of passionate
exaltation, to trample on him, certainly without any wish to suggest
sexual perversion. If it is true that the Antonio of Otway's _Venice
Preserved_ is a caricature of Shaftesbury, then it would appear that one
of the greatest of English statesmen was supposed to exhibit very
pronounced and characteristic masochistic tendencies; and in more recent
days masochistic expressions have been noted as occurring in the
love-letters of so emphatically virile a statesman as Bismarck.
Thus a minor degree of the masochistic tendency may be said to be fairly
common, while its more pronounced manifestations are more common than
pronounced sadism.[94] It very frequently affects persons of a sensitive,
refined, and artistic temperament. It may even be said that this tendency
is in the line of civilization. Krafft-Ebing points out that some of the
most delicate and romantic love-episodes of the Middle Ages are distinctly
colored by masochistic emotion.[95] The increasing tendency to masochism
with increasing civilization becomes explicable if we accept Colin Scott's
"secondary law of courting" as accessory to the primary law that the male
is active, and the female passive and imaginatively attentive to the
states of the excited male. According to the secondary law, "the female
develops a superadded activity, the male becoming relatively passive and
imaginatively attentive to the psychical and bodily states of the
female."[96] We may probably agree that this "secondary law of courting"
does really represent a tendency of love in individuals of complex and
sensitive nature, and the outcome of such a receptive attitude on the part
of the male is undoubtedly in well-marked cases a desire of submission to
the female's will, and a craving to experience in some physical or psychic
form, not necessarily painful, the manifestations of her activity.
When we turn from vague and unpronounced forms of the masochistic tendency
to the more definite forms in which it becomes an unquestionable sexual
perversion, we find a very eminent and fairly typical example in Rousseau,
an example all the more interesting because here the subject has himself
portrayed his perversion in his famous _Confessions_. It is, however, the
name of a less eminent author, the Austrian novelist, Sacher-Masoch, which
has become identified with the perversion through the fact that
Krafft-Ebing fixed upon it as furnishing a convenient counterpart to the
term "sadism." It is on the strength of a considerable number of his
novels and stories, more especially of _Die Venus im Pelz_, that
Krafft-Ebing took the scarcely warrantable liberty of identifying his
name, while yet living, with a sexual perversion.
Sacher-Masoch's biography has been written with intimate
knowledge and much candor by C.F. von Schlichtegroll
(_Sacher-Masoch und der Masochismus_, 1901) and, more indirectly,
by his first wife Wanda von Sacher-Masoch in her autobiography
(_Meine Lebensbeichte_, 1906; French translation, _Confession de
ma Vie_, 1907). Schlichtegroll's book is written with a somewhat
undue attempt to exalt his hero and to attribute his misfortunes
to his first wife. The autobiography of the latter, however,
enables us to form a more complete picture of Sacher-Masoch's
life, for, while his wife by no means spares herself, she clearly
shows that Sacher-Masoch was the victim of his own abnormal
temperament, and she presents both the sensitive, refined,
exalted, and generous aspects of his nature, and his morbid,
imaginative, vain aspects.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in 1836 at Lemberg in Galicia.
He was of Spanish, German, and more especially Slavonic race. The
founder of the family may be said to be a certain Don Matthias
Sacher, a young Spanish nobleman, in the sixteenth century, who
settled in Prague. The novelist's father was director of police
in Lemberg and married Charlotte von Masoch, a Little Russian
lady of noble birth. The novelist, the eldest child of this
union, was not born until after nine years of marriage, and in
infancy was so delicate that he was not expected to survive. He
began to improve, however, when his mother gave him to be suckled
to a robust Russian peasant woman, from whom, as he said later,
he gained not only health, but "his soul"; from her he learned
all the strange and melancholy legends of her people and a love
of the Little Russians which never left him. While still a child
young Sacher-Masoch was in the midst of the bloody scenes of the
revolution which culminated in 1848. When he was 12 the family
migrated to Prague, and the boy, though precocious in his
development, then first learned the German language, of which he
attained so fine a mastery. At a very early age he had found the
atmosphere, and even some of the most characteristic elements, of
the peculiar types which mark his work as a novelist.
It is interesting to trace the germinal elements of those
peculiarities which so strongly affected his imagination on the
sexual side. As a child, he was greatly attracted by
representations of cruelty; he loved to gaze at pictures of
executions, the legends of martyrs were his favorite reading, and
with the onset of puberty he regularly dreamed that he was
fettered and in the power of a cruel woman who tortured him. It
has been said by an anonymous author that the women of Galicia
either rule their husbands entirely and make them their slaves or
themselves sink to be the wretchedest of slaves. At the age of
10, according to Schlichtegroll's narrative, the child Leopold
witnessed a scene in which a woman of the former kind, a certain
Countess Xenobia X., a relative of his own on the paternal side,
played the chief part, and this scene left an undying impress on
his imagination. The Countess was a beautiful but wanton
creature, and the child adored her, impressed alike by her beauty
and the costly furs she wore. She accepted his devotion and
little services and would sometimes allow him to assist her in
dressing; on one occasion, as he was kneeling before her to put
on her ermine slippers, he kissed her feet; she smiled and gave
him a kick which filled him with pleasure. Not long afterward
occurred the episode which so profoundly affected his
imagination. He was playing with his sisters at hide-and-seek and
had carefully hidden himself behind the dresses on a clothes-rail
in the Countess's bedroom. At this moment the Countess suddenly
entered the house and ascended the stairs, followed by a lover,
and the child, who dared not betray his presence, saw the
countess sink down on a sofa and begin to caress her lover. But a
few moments later the husband, accompanied by two friends, dashed
into the room. Before, however, he could decide which of the
lovers to turn against the Countess had risen and struck him so
powerful a blow in the face with her fist that he fell back
streaming with blood. She then seized a whip, drove all three men
out of the room, and in the confusion the lover slipped away. At
this moment the clothes-rail fell and the child, the involuntary
witness of the scene, was revealed to the Countess, who now fell
on him in anger, threw him to the ground, pressed her knee on his
shoulder, and struck him unmercifully. The pain was great, and
yet he was conscious of a strange pleasure. While this
castigation was proceeding the Count returned, no longer in a
rage, but meek and humble as a slave, and kneeled down before her
to beg forgiveness. As the boy escaped he saw her kick her
husband. The child could not resist the temptation to return to
the spot; the door was closed and he could see nothing, but he
heard the sound of the whip and the groans of the Count beneath
his wife's blows.
It is unnecessary to insist that in this scene, acting on a
highly sensitive and somewhat peculiar child, we have the key to
the emotional attitude which affected so much of Sacher-Masoch's
work. As his biographer remarks, woman became to him, during a
considerable part of his life, a creature at once to be loved and
hated, a being whose beauty and brutality enabled her to set her
foot at will on the necks of men, and in the heroine of his first
important novel, the _Emissär_, dealing with the Polish
Revolution, he embodied the contradictory personality of Countess
Xenobia. Even the whip and the fur garments, Sacher-Masoch's
favorite emotional symbols, find their explanation in this early
episode. He was accustomed to say of an attractive woman: "I
should like to see her in furs," and, of an unattractive woman:
"I could not imagine her in furs." His writing-paper at one time
was adorned with the figure of a woman in Russian Boyar costume,
her cloak lined with ermine, and brandishing a scourge. On his
walls he liked to have pictures of women in furs, of the kind of
which there is so magnificent an example by Rubens in the gallery
at Munich. He would even keep a woman's fur cloak on an ottoman
in his study and stroke it from time to time, finding that his
brain thus received the same kind of stimulation as Schiller
found in the odor of rotten apples.[97]
At the age of 13, in the revolution of 1848, young Sacher-Masoch
received his baptism of fire; carried away in the popular
movement, he helped to defend the barricades together with a
young lady, a relative of his family, an amazon with a pistol in
her girdle, such as later he loved to depict. This episode was,
however, but a brief interruption of his education; he pursued
his studies with brilliance, and on the higher side his education
was aided by his father's esthetic tastes. Amateur theatricals
were in special favor at his home, and here even the serious
plays of Goethe and Gogol were performed, thus helping to train
and direct the boy's taste. It is, perhaps, however, significant
that it was a tragic event which, at the age of 16, first brought
to him the full realization of life and the consciousness of his
own power. This was the sudden death of his favorite sister. He
became serious and quiet, and always regarded this grief as a
turning-point in his life.
At the Universities of Prague and Graz he studied with such zeal
that when only 19 he took his doctor's degree in law and shortly
afterward became a _privatdocent_ for German history at Graz.
Gradually, however, the charms of literature asserted themselves
definitely, and he soon abandoned teaching. He took part,
however, in the war of 1866 in Italy, and at the battle of
Solferino he was decorated on the field for bravery in action by
the Austrian field-marshal. These incidents, however, had little
disturbing influence on Sacher-Masoch's literary career, and he
was gradually acquiring a European reputation by his novels and
stories.
A far more seriously disturbing influence had already begun to be
exerted on his life by a series of love-episodes. Some of these
were of slight and ephemeral character; some were a source of
unalloyed happiness, all the more so if there was an element of
extravagance to appeal to his Quixotic nature. He always longed
to give a dramatic and romantic character to his life, his wife
says, and he spent some blissful days on an occasion when he ran
away to Florence with a Russian princess as her private
secretary. Most often these episodes culminated in deception and
misery. It was after a relationship of this kind from which he
could not free himself for four years that he wrote _Die
Geschiedene Frau, Passionsgeschichte eines Idealisten_, putting
into it much of his own personal history. At one time he was
engaged to a sweet and charming young girl. Then it was that he
met a young woman at Graz, Laura Rümelin, 27 years of age,
engaged as a glove-maker, and living with her mother. Though of
poor parentage, with little or no knowledge of the world, she had
great natural ability and intelligence. Schlichtegroll represents
her as spontaneously engaging in a mysterious intrigue with the
novelist. Her own detailed narrative renders the circumstances
more intelligible. She approached Sacher-Masoch by letter,
adopting for disguise the name of his heroine Wanda von Dunajev,
in order to recover possession of some compromising letters which
had been written to him, as a joke, by a friend of hers.
Sacher-Masoch insisted on seeing his correspondent before
returning the letters, and with his eager thirst for romantic
adventure he imagined that she was a married woman of the
aristocratic world, probably a Russian countess, whose simple
costume was a disguise. Not anxious to reveal the prosaic facts,
she humored him in his imaginations and a web of mystification
was thus formed. A strong attraction grew up on both sides and,
though for some time Laura Rümelin maintained the mystery and
held herself aloof from him, a relationship was formed and a
child born. Thereupon, in 1893, they married. Before long,
however, there was disillusion on both sides. She began to detect
the morbid, chimerical, and unpractical aspects of his character,
and he realized that not only was his wife not an aristocrat,
but, what was of more importance to him, she was by no means the
domineering heroine of his dreams. Soon after marriage, in the
course of an innocent romp in which the whole of the small
household took part, he asked his wife to inflict a whipping on
him. She refused, and he thereupon suggested that the servant
should do it; the wife failed to take this idea seriously; but he
had it carried out, with great satisfaction at the severity of
the castigation he received. When, however, his wife explained to
him that, after this incident, it was impossible for the servant
to stay, Sacher-Masoch quite agreed and she was at once
discharged. But he constantly found pleasure in placing his wife
in awkward or compromising circumstances, a pleasure she was too
normal to share. This necessarily led to much domestic
wretchedness. He had persuaded her, against her wish, to whip him
nearly every day, with whips which he devised, having nails
attached to them. He found this a stimulant to his literary work,
and it enabled him to dispense in his novels with his stereotyped
heroine who is always engaged in subjugating men, for, as he
explained to his wife, when he had the reality in his life he was
no longer obsessed by it in his imaginative dreams. Not content
with this, however, he was constantly desirous for his wife to be
unfaithful. He even put an advertisement in a newspaper to the
effect that a young and beautiful woman desired to make the
acquaintance of an energetic man. The wife, however, though she
wished to please her husband, was not anxious to do so to this
extent. She went to an hotel by appointment to meet a stranger
who had answered this advertisement, but when she had explained
to him the state of affairs he chivalrously conducted her home.
It was some time before Sacher-Masoch eventually succeeded in
rendering his wife unfaithful. He attended to the minutest
details of her toilette on this occasion, and as he bade her
farewell at the door he exclaimed: "How I envy him!" This episode
thoroughly humiliated the wife, and from that moment her love for
her husband turned to hate. A final separation was only a
question of time. Sacher-Masoch formed a relationship with Hulda
Meister, who had come to act as secretary and translator to him,
while his wife became attached to Rosenthal, a clever journalist
later known to readers of the _Figaro_ as "Jacques St.-Cère," who
realized her painful position and felt sympathy and affection for
her. She went to live with him in Paris and, having refused to
divorce her husband, he eventually obtained a divorce from her;
she states, however, that she never at any time had physical
relationships with Rosenthal, who was a man of fragile
organization and health. Sacher-Masoch united himself to Hulda
Meister, who is described by the first wife as a prim and faded
but coquettish old maid, and by the biographer as a highly
accomplished and gentle woman, who cared for him with almost
maternal devotion. No doubt there is truth in both descriptions.
It must be noted that, as Wanda clearly shows, apart from his
abnormal sexual temperament, Sacher-Masoch was kind and
sympathetic, and he was strongly attached to his eldest child.
Eulenburg also quotes the statement of a distinguished Austrian
woman writer acquainted with him that, "apart from his sexual
eccentricities, he was an amiable, simple, and sympathetic man
with a touchingly tender love for his children." He had very few
needs, did not drink or smoke, and though he liked to put the
woman he was attached to in rich furs and fantastically gorgeous
raiment he dressed himself with extreme simplicity. His wife
quotes the saying of another woman that he was as simple as a
child and as naughty as a monkey.
In 1883 Sacher-Masoch and Hulda Meister settled in Lindheim, a
village in Germany near the Taunus, a spot to which the novelist
seems to have been attached because in the grounds of his little
estate was a haunted and ruined tower associated with a tragic
medieval episode. Here, after many legal delays, Sacher-Masoch
was able to render his union with Hulda Meister legitimate; here
two children were in due course born, and here the novelist spent
the remaining years of his life in comparative peace. At first,
as is usual, treated with suspicion by the peasants,
Sacher-Masoch gradually acquired great influence over them; he
became a kind of Tolstoy in the rural life around him, the friend
and confidant of all the villagers (something of Tolstoy's
communism is also, it appears, to be seen in the books he wrote
at this time), while the theatrical performances which he
inaugurated, and in which his wife took an active part, spread
the fame of the household in many neighboring villages. Meanwhile
his health began to break up; a visit to Nauheim in 1894 was of
no benefit, and he died March 9, 1895.
A careful consideration of the phenomena of sadism and masochism may be
said to lead us to the conclusion that there is no real line of
demarcation. Even De Sade himself was not a pure sadist, as Bloch's
careful definition is alone sufficient to indicate; it might even be
argued that De Sade was really a masochist; the investigation of histories
of sadism and masochism, even those given by Krafft-Ebing (as, indeed,
Colin Scott and Féré have already pointed out), constantly reveals traces
of both groups of phenomena in the same individual. They cannot,
therefore, be regarded as opposed manifestations. This has been felt by
some writers, who have, in consequence, proposed other names more clearly
indicating the relationship of the phenomena. Féré speaks of sexual
algophily[98]; he only applies the term to masochism; it might equally
well be applied to sadism. Schrenck-Notzing, to cover both sadism and
masochism, has invented the term algolagnia (algos, pain, and lagnos
sexually excited), and calls the former active, the latter passive,
algolagnia.[99] Eulenburg has also emphasized the close connection between
these groups of perverted sexual manifestations, and has adopted the same
terms, adding the further group of ideal (illusionary) algolagnia, to
cover the cases in which the mere autosuggestive representation of pain,
inflicted or suffered, suffices to give sexual gratification.[100]
A brief discussion of the terms "sadism" and "masochism" has imposed
itself upon us at this point because as soon as, in any study of the
relationship between love and pain, we pass over the limits of normal
manifestations into a region which is more or less abnormal, these two
conceptions are always brought before us, and it was necessary to show on
what grounds they are here rejected as the pivots on which the discussion
ought to turn. We may accept them as useful terms to indicate two groups
of clinical phenomena; but we cannot regard them as of any real scientific
value. Having reached this result, we may continue our consideration of
the love-bite, as the normal manifestation of the connection between love
and pain which most naturally leads us across the frontier of the
abnormal.
The result of the love-bite in its extreme degree is to shed blood. This
cannot be regarded as the direct aim of the bite in its normal
manifestations, for the mingled feelings of close contact, of passionate
gripping, of symbolic devouring, which constitute the emotional
accompaniments of the bite would be too violently discomposed by actual
wounding and real shedding of blood. With some persons, however, perhaps
more especially women, the love-bite is really associated with a conscious
desire, even if more or less restrained, to draw blood, a real delight in
this process, a love of blood. Probably this only occurs in persons who
are not absolutely normal, but on the borderland of the abnormal. We have
to admit that this craving has, however, a perfectly normal basis. There
is scarcely any natural object with so profoundly emotional an effect as
blood, and it is very easy to understand why this should be so.[101]
Moreover, blood enters into the sphere of courtship by virtue of the same
conditions by which cruelty enters into it; they are both accidents of
combat, and combat is of the very essence of animal and primitive human
courtship, certainly its most frequent accompaniment. So that the
repelling or attracting fascination of blood may be regarded as a
by-product of normal courtship, which, like other such by-products, may
become an essential element of abnormal courtship.[102]
Normally the fascination of blood, if present at all during sexual
excitement, remains more or less latent, either because it is weak or
because the checks that inhibit it are inevitably very powerful.
Occasionally it becomes more clearly manifest, and this may happen early
in life. Féré records the case of a man of Anglo-Saxon origin, of sound
heredity so far as could be ascertained and presenting no obvious stigmata
of degeneration, who first experienced sexual manifestations at the age of
5 when a boy cousin was attacked by bleeding at the nose. It was the first
time he had seen such a thing and he experienced erection and much
pleasure at the sight. This was repeated the next time the cousin's nose
bled and also whenever he witnessed any injuries or wounds, especially
when occurring in males. A few years later he began to find pleasure in
pinching and otherwise inflicting slight suffering. This sadism was not,
however, further developed, although a tendency to inversion
persisted.[103]
Somewhat similar may have been the origin of the attraction of
blood in a case which has been reported to me of a youth of 17,
the youngest of a large family who are all very strong and
entirely normal. He is himself, however, delicate, overgrown,
with a narrow chest, a small head, and babyish features, while
mentally he is backward, with very defective memory and scant
powers of assimilation. He is intensely nervous, peevish, and
subject to fits of childish rage. He takes violent fancies to
persons of his own sex. But he appears to have only one way of
obtaining sexual excitement and gratification. It is his custom
to get into a hot bath and there to produce erection and
emission, not by masturbation, but by thinking of flowing blood.
He does not associate himself with the causation of this
imaginary flow of blood; he is merely the passive but pleased
spectator. He is aware of his peculiarity and endeavors to shake
it off, but his efforts to obtain normal pleasure by thinking of
a girl are vain.
I may here narrate a case which has been communicated to me of
algolagnia in a woman, combined with sexual hyperesthesia.
R.D., aged 25, married, and of good social position; she is a
small and dark woman, restless and alert in manner. She has one
child.
She has practised masturbation from an early age--ever since she
can remember--by the method of external friction and pressure.
From the age of 17 she was able (and is still) to produce the
orgasm almost without effort, by calling up the image of any man
who had struck her fancy. She has often done so while seated
talking to such a man, even when he is almost a stranger; in
doing it, she says, a tightening of the muscles of the thighs and
the slightest movement are sufficient. Ugly men (if not
deformed), as well as men with the reputation of being _roués_,
greatly excite her sexually, more especially if of good social
position, though this is not essential.
At the age of 18 she became hysterical, probably, she herself
believes, in consequence of a great increase at that time of
indulgence in masturbation. The doctors, apparently suspecting
her habits, urged her parents to get her married early. She
married, at the age of 20, a man about twice her own age.
As a child (and in a less degree still) she was very fond of
watching dog-fights. This spectacle produced strong sexual
feelings and usually orgasm, especially if much blood was shed
during the fight. Clean cuts and wounds greatly attract her,
whether on herself or a man. She has frequently slightly cut or
scratched herself "to see the blood," and likes to suck the
wound, thinking the taste "delicious." This produces strong
sexual feelings and often orgasm, especially if at the time she
thinks of some attractive man and imagines that she is sucking
his blood. The sight of injury to a woman only very slightly
affects her, and that, she thinks, only because of an involuntary
association of ideas. Nor has the sight of suffering in illness
any exciting effects, only that which is due to violence, and
when there is a visible cause for the suffering, such as cuts and
wounds. (Bruises, from the absence of blood, have only a slight
effect.) The excitement is intensified if she imagines that she
has herself inflicted the injury. She likes to imagine that the
man wished to rape her, and that she fought him in order to make
him more greatly value her favor, so wounding him.
Impersonal ideas of torture also excite her. She thinks Fox's
_Book of Martyrs_ "lovely," and the more horrible and bloody the
tortures described the greater is the sexual excitement produced.
The book excites her from the point of view of the torturer, not
that of the victim. She has frequently masturbated while reading
it.
So far as practicable she has sought to carry out these ideas in
her relations with her husband. She has several times bitten him
till the blood came and sucked the bite during coitus. She likes
to bite him enough to make him wince. The pleasure is greatly
heightened by thinking of various tortures, chiefly by cutting.
She likes to have her husband talk to her, and she to him, of all
the tortures they could inflict on each other. She has, however,
never actually tried to carry out these tortures. She would like
to, but dares not, as she is sure he could not endure them. She
has no desire for her husband to try them on her, although she
likes to hear him talk about it.
She is at the same time fond of normal coitus, even to excess.
She likes her husband to remain entirely passive during
connection, so that he can continue in a state of strong erection
for a long time. She can thus, she says, procure for herself the
orgasm a number of times in succession, even nine or ten, quite
easily. On one occasion she even had the orgasm twenty-six times
within about one and a quarter hours, her husband during this
time having two orgasms. (She is quite certain about the accuracy
of this statement.) During this feat much talk about torture was
indulged in, and it took place after a month's separation from
her husband, during which she was careful not to masturbate, so
that she might have "a real good time" when he came back. She
acknowledges that on this occasion she was a "complete wreck" for
a couple of days afterward, but states that usually ten or a
dozen orgasms (or spasms, as she terms them) only make her "feel
lively." She becomes frenzied with excitement during intercourse
and insensible to everything but the pleasure of it.
She has never hitherto allowed anyone (except her husband after
marriage) to know of her sadistic impulses, nor has she carried
them out with anyone, though she would like to, if she dared. Nor
has she allowed any man but her husband to have connection with
her or to take any liberties.
Outbursts of sadism may occur episodically in fairly normal persons. Thus,
Coutagne describes the case of a lad of 17--always regarded as quite
normal, and without any signs of degeneracy, even on careful examination,
or any traces of hysteria or alcoholism, though there was insanity among
his cousins--who had had occasional sexual relations for a year or two,
and on one occasion, being in a state of erection, struck the girl three
times on the breast and abdomen with a kitchen knife bought for the
purpose. He was much ashamed of his act immediately afterward, and, all
the circumstances being taken into consideration, he was acquitted by the
court.[104] Here we seem to have the obscure and latent fascination of
blood, which is almost normal, germinating momentarily into an active
impulse which is distinctly abnormal, though it produced little beyond
those incisions which Vatsyayana disapproved of, but still regarded as a
part of courtship. One step more and we are amid the most outrageous and
extreme of all forms of sexual perversion: with the heroes of De Sade's
novels, who, in exemplification of their author's most cherished ideals,
plan scenes of debauchery in which the flowing of blood is an essential
element of coitus; with the Marshall Gilles de Rais and the Hungarian
Countess Bathory, whose lust could only be satiated by the death of
innumerable victims.
This impulse to stab--with no desire to kill, or even in most
cases to give pain, but only to draw blood and so either
stimulate or altogether gratify the sexual impulse--is no doubt
the commonest form of sanguinary sadism. These women-stabbers
have been known in France as _piqueurs_ for nearly a century, and
in Germany are termed _Stecher_ or _Messerstecher_ (they have
been studied by Näcke, "Zur Psychologie der sadistischen
Messerstecher," _Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropologie_, Bd. 35,
1909). A case of this kind where a man stabbed girls in the
abdomen occurred in Paris in the middle of the eighteenth
century, and in 1819 or 1820 there seems to have been an epidemic
of _piqueurs_ in Paris; as we learn from a letter of Charlotte
von Schiller's to Knebel; the offenders (though perhaps there was
only one) frequented the Boulevards and the Palais Royal and
stabbed women in the buttocks or thighs; they were never caught.
About the same time similar cases of a slighter kind occurred in
London, Brussels, Hamburg, and Munich.
Stabbers are nearly always men, but cases of the same perversion
in women are not unknown. Thus Dr. Kiernan informs me of an Irish
woman, aged 40, and at the beginning of the menopause, who, in
New York in 1909, stabbed five men with a hatpin. The motive was
sexual and she told one of the men that she stabbed him because
she "loved" him.
Gilles de Rais, who had fought beside Joan of Arc, is the classic
example of sadism in its extreme form, involving the murder of
youths and maidens. Bernelle considers that there is some truth
in the contention of Huysmans that the association with Joan of
Arc was a predisposing cause in unbalancing Gilles de Rais.
Another cause was his luxurious habit of life. He himself, no
doubt rightly, attached importance to the suggestions received in
reading Suetonius. He appears to have been a sexually precocious
child, judging from an obscure passage in his confessions. He was
artistic and scholarly, fond of books, of the society of learned
men, and of music. Bernelle sums him up as "a pious warrior, a
cruel and keen artist, a voluptuous assassin, an exalted mystic,"
who was at the same time unbalanced, a superior degenerate, and
morbidly impulsive. (The best books on Gilles de Rais are the
Abbé Bossard's _Gilles de Rais_, in which, however, the author,
being a priest, treats his subject as quite sane and abnormally
wicked; Huysmans's novel, _La-Bas_, which embodies a detailed
study of Gilles de Rais, and F.H. Bernelle's Thèse de Paris, _La
Psychose de Gilles de Rais_, 1910.)
The opinion has been hazarded that the history of Gilles de Rais
is merely a legend. This view is not accepted, but there can be
no doubt that the sadistic manifestations which occurred in the
Middle Ages were mixed up with legendary and folk-lore elements.
These elements centered on the conception of the _werwolf_,
supposed to be a man temporarily transformed into a wolf with
blood-thirsty impulses. (See, e.g., articles "Werwolf" and
"Lycanthropy" in _Encyclopædia Britannica_.) France, especially,
was infested with werwolves in the sixteenth century. In 1603,
however, it was decided at Bordeaux, in a trial involving a
werwolf, that lycanthropy was only an insane delusion. Dumas
("Les Loup-Garous," _Journal de Psychologie Normale et
Pathologique_, May-June, 1907) argues that the medieval werwolves
were sadists whose crimes were largely imaginative, though
sometimes real, the predecessor of the modern Jack the Ripper.
The complex nature of the elements making up the belief in the
werwolf is emphasized by Ernest Jones, _Der Alptraum_, 1912.
Related to the werwolf, but distinct, was the _vampire_, supposed
to be a dead person who rose from the dead to suck the blood of
the living during sleep. By way of reprisal the living dug up,
exorcised, and mutilated the supposed vampires. This was called
vampirism. The name vampire was then transferred to the living
person who had so treated a corpse. All profanation of the
corpse, whatever its origin, is now frequently called vampirism
(Epaulow, _Vampirisme_, Thèse de Lyon, 1901; id., "Le Vampire du
Muy," _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Sept., 1903). The
earliest definite reference to necrophily is in Herodotus, who
tells (bk. ii, ch. lxxxix) of an Egyptian who had connection with
the corpse of a woman recently dead. Epaulow gives various old
cases and, at full length, the case which he himself
investigated, of Ardisson, the "Vampire du Muy." W.A.F. Browne
also has an interesting article on "Necrophilism" (_Journal of
Mental Science_, Jan., 1875) which he regards as atavistic. When
there is, in addition, mutilation of the corpse, the condition is
termed necrosadism. There seems usually to be no true sadism in
either necrosadism or necrophilism. (See, however, Bloch,
_Beiträge_, vol. ii, p. 284 et seq.)
It must be said also that cases of rape followed by murder are
quite commonly not sadistic. The type of such cases is
represented by Soleilland, who raped and then murdered children.
He showed no sadistic perversion. He merely killed to prevent
discovery, as a burglar who is interrupted may commit murder in
order to escape. (E. Dupré, "L'Affaire Soleilland," _Archives
d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Jan.-Feb., 1910.)
A careful and elaborate study of a completely developed sadist
has been furnished by Lacassagne, Rousset, and Papillon
("L'Affaire Reidal," _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_,
Oct.-Nov., 1907). Reidal, a youth of 18, a seminarist, was a
congenital sanguinary sadist who killed another youth and was
finally sent to an asylum. From the age of 4 he had voluptuous
ideas connected with blood and killing, and liked to play at
killing with other children. He was of infantile physical
development, with a pleasant, childish expression of face, very
religious, and hated obscenity and immorality. But the love of
blood and murder was an irresistible obsession and its
gratification produced immense emotional relief.
Sadism generally has been especially studied by Lacassagne,
_Vacher l'Eventreur et les Crimes Sadiques_, 1899. Zoösadism, or
sadism toward animals, has been dealt with by P. Thomas, "Le
Sadisme sur les Animaux," _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_,
Sept., 1903. Auto-sadism, or "auto-erotic cruelty," that is to
say, injuries inflicted on a person by himself with a sexual
motive, has been investigated by G. Bach (_Sexuelle Verrirungen
des Menschen und der Nature_, p. 427); this condition seems,
however, a form of algolagnia more masochistic than sadistic in
character.
With regard to the medico-legal aspects, Kiernan ("Responsibility
in Active Algophily," _Medicine_, April, 1903) sets forth the
reasons in favor of the full and complete responsibility of
sadists, and Harold Moyer comes to the same conclusion ("Is
Sexual Perversion Insanity?" _Alienist and Neurologist_, May,
1907). See also Thoinot's _Medico-legal Aspects of Moral
Offenses_ (edited by Weysse, 1911), ch. xviii. While we are
probably justified in considering the sadist as morally not
insane in the technical sense, we must remember that he is, for
the most part, highly abnormal from the outset. As Gaupp points
out (_Sexual-Probleme_, Oct., 1909, p. 797), we cannot measure
the influences which create the sadist and we must not therefore
attempt to "punish" him, but we are bound to place him in a
position where he will not injure society.
It is enough here to emphasize the fact that there is no solution of
continuity in the links that bind the absolutely normal manifestations of
sex with the most extreme violations of all human law. This is so true
that in saying that these manifestations are violations of all human law
we cannot go on to add, what would seem fairly obvious, that they are
violations also of all natural law. We have but to go sufficiently far
back, or sufficiently far afield, in the various zoölogical series to find
that manifestations which, from the human point of view, are in the
extreme degree abnormally sadistic here become actually normal. Among very
various species wounding and rending normally take place at or immediately
after coitus; if we go back to the beginning of animal life in the
protozoa sexual conjugation itself is sometimes found to present the
similitude, if not the actuality, of the complete devouring of one
organism by another. Over a very large part of nature, as it has been
truly said, "but a thin veil divides love from death."[105]
There is, indeed, on the whole, a point of difference. In that abnormal
sadism which appears from time to time among civilized human beings it is
nearly always the female who becomes the victim of the male. But in the
normal sadism which occurs throughout a large part of nature it is nearly
always the male who is the victim of the female. It is the male spider who
impregnates the female at the risk of his life and sometimes perishes in
the attempt; it is the male bee who, after intercourse with the queen,
falls dead from that fatal embrace, leaving her to fling aside his
entrails and calmly pursue her course.[106] If it may seem to some that
the course of our inquiry leads us to contemplate with equanimity, as a
natural phenomenon, a certain semblance of cruelty in man in his relations
with woman, they may, if they will, reflect that this phenomenon is but a
very slight counterpoise to that cruelty which has been naturally exerted
by the female on the male long even before man began to be.