Summary of Results Reached--The Joy of Emotional Expansion--The
Satisfaction of the Craving for Power--The Influence of Neurasthenic and
Neuropathic Conditions--The Problem of Pain in Love Largely Constitutes a
Special Case of Erotic Symbolism.
It may seem to some that in our discussion of the relationships of love
and pain we have covered a very wide field. This was inevitable. The
subject is peculiarly difficult and complex, and if we are to gain a real
insight into its nature we must not attempt to force the facts to fit into
any narrow and artificial formulas of our own construction. Yet, as we
have unraveled this seemingly confused mass of phenomena it will not have
escaped the careful reader that the apparently diverse threads we have
disentangled run in a parallel and uniform manner; they all have a like
source and they all converge to a like result. We have seen that the
starting-point of the whole group of manifestations must be found in the
essential facts of courtship among animal and primitive human societies.
Pain is seldom very far from some of the phases of primitive courtship;
but it is not the pain which is the essential element in courtship, it is
the state of intense emotion, of tumescence, with which at any moment, in
some shape or another, pain may, in some way or another, be brought into
connection. So that we have come to see that in the phrase "love and pain"
we have to understand by "pain" a state of intense emotional excitement
with which pain in the stricter sense may be associated, but is by no
means necessarily associated. It is the strong emotion which exerts the
irresistible fascination in the lover, in his partner, or in both. The
pain is merely the means to that end. It is the lever which is employed to
bring the emotional force to bear on the sexual impulse. The question of
love and pain is mainly a question of emotional dynamics.
In attaining this view of our subject we have learned that any impulse of
true cruelty is almost outside the field altogether. The mistake was
indeed obvious and inevitable. Let us suppose that every musical
instrument is sensitive and that every musical performance involves the
infliction of pain on the instrument. It would then be very difficult
indeed to realize that the pleasure of music lies by no means in the
infliction of pain. We should certainly find would-be scientific and
analytical people ready to declare that the pleasure of music is the
pleasure of giving pain, and that the emotional effects of music are due
to the pain thus inflicted. In algolagnia, as in music, it is not cruelty
that is sought; it is the joy of being plunged among the waves of that
great primitive ocean of emotions which underlies the variegated world of
our everyday lives, and pain--a pain which, as we have seen, is often
deprived so far as possible of cruelty, though sometimes by very thin and
feeble devices--is merely the channel by which that ocean is reached.
If we try to carry our inquiry beyond the point we have been content to
reach, and ask ourselves why this emotional intoxication exerts so
irresistible a fascination, we might find a final reply in the explanation
of Nietzsche--who regarded this kind of intoxication as of great
significance both in life and in art--that it gives us the consciousness
of energy and the satisfaction of our craving for power.[154] To carry the
inquiry to this point would be, however, to take it into a somewhat
speculative and metaphysical region, and we have perhaps done well not to
attempt to analyze further the joy of emotional expansion. We must be
content to regard the profound satisfaction of emotion as due to a
widespread motor excitement, the elements of which we cannot yet
completely analyze.[155]
It is because the joy of emotional intoxication is the end really sought
that we have to regard the supposed opposition between "sadism" and
"masochism" as unimportant and indeed misleading. The emotional value of
pain is equally great whether the pain is inflicted, suffered, witnessed,
or merely exists as a mental imagination, and there is no reason why it
should not coexist in all these forms in the same person, as, in fact, we
frequently find it.
The particular emotions which are invoked by pain to reinforce the sexual
impulse are more especially anger and fear, and, as we have seen, these
two very powerful and primitive emotions are--on the active and passive
sides, respectively--the emotions most constantly brought into play in
animal and early human courtship; so that they naturally constitute the
emotional reservoirs from which the sexual impulse may still most easily
draw. It is not difficult to show that the various forms in which
"pain"--as we must here understand pain--is employed in the service of the
sexual impulse are mainly manifestations or transformations of anger or
fear, either in their simple or usually more complex forms, in some of
which anger and fear may be mingled.
We thus accept the biological origin of the psychological association
between love and pain; it is traceable to the phenomena of animal
courtship. We do not on this account exclude the more direct physiological
factor. It may seem surprising that manifestations that have their origin
in primeval forms of courtship should in many cases coincide with actual
sensations of definite anatomical base today, and still more surprising
that these traditional manifestations and actual sensations should so
often be complementary to each other in their active and passive aspects:
that is to say, that the pleasure of whipping should be matched by the
pleasure of being whipped, the pleasure of mock strangling by the pleasure
of being so strangled, that pain inflicted is not more desirable than pain
suffered. But such coincidence is of the very essence of the whole group
of phenomena. The manifestations of courtship were from the first
conditioned by physiological facts; it is not strange that they should
always tend to run _pari passu_ with physiological facts. The
manifestations which failed to find anchorage in physiological
relationships might well tend to die out. Even under the most normal
circumstances, in healthy persons of healthy heredity, the manifestations
we have been considering are liable to make themselves felt. Under such
circumstances, however, they never become of the first importance in the
sexual process; they are often little more than play. It is only under
neurasthenic or neuropathic conditions--that is to say, in an organism
which from acquired or congenital causes, and usually perhaps both, has
become enfeebled, irritable, "fatigued"--that these manifestations are
liable to flourish vigorously, to come to the forefront of sexual
consciousness, and even to attain such seriously urgent importance that
they may in themselves constitute the entire end and aim of sexual desire.
Under these pathological conditions, pain, in the broad and special sense
in which we have been obliged to define it, becomes a welcome tonic and a
more or less indispensable stimulant to the sexual system.
It will not have escaped the careful reader that in following out our
subject we have sometimes been brought into contact with manifestations
which scarcely seem to come within any definition of pain. This is
undoubtedly so, and the references to these manifestations were not
accidental, for they serve to indicate the real bearings of our subject.
The relationships of love and pain constitute a subject at once of so
much gravity and so much psychological significance that it was well to
devote to them a special study. But pain, as we have here to understand
it, largely constitutes a special case of what we shall later learn to
know as erotic symbolism: that is to say, the psychic condition in which a
part of the sexual process, a single idea or group of ideas, tends to
assume unusual importance, or even to occupy the whole field of sexual
consciousness, the part becoming a symbol that stands for the whole. When
we come to the discussion of this great group of abnormal sexual
manifestations it will frequently be necessary to refer to the results we
have reached in studying the sexual significance of pain.