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The word “masochism,” coined by Krafft-Ebing, was taken from the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a nineteenth-century novelist in Austria, who asked his wife to whip him and flog him as a prelude to sexual intercourse. As a young boy, he had by chance witnessed his aunt in an adulterous sexual act as he hid in the closet. This sexual scene was interrupted by her husband who accidentally strode into the room. In her embarrassment, when she discovered her nephew hiding in the closet, she severely chastised him with words and whipped him. In later years, he admitted feeling pleasure from the beating and remembered that she had worn a short, fur-lined jacket — which gave him sexual excitement. As an adult he tended to repeat this experience by seeking the same pleasure through beatings and the desire to have his wife wear furs in connection with the sexual act.
The first clinical description of masochism emphasized the use of physical pain in order to achieve sexual release. In strict psychoanalytic terms today, masochism still means the suffering of physical pain as a requisite to orgasm. However, this concept today is no longer restricted to perverse erotic experiences but is also applied to self-induced psychological suffering such as shame, humiliation, and rejection, not necessarily connected with sexual intercourse.
The masochist over-eroticizes and overemphasizes love and sex so that they loom out of proportion to all else in life. To a dependent or self-effacing person, usually found among masochists, erotic love acts as the supreme fulfillment. Karen Horney puts it well: “Love must and does appear as the ticket to paradise, where all woe ends; no more loneliness; no more feeling lost, guilty, and unworthy; no more responsibility for self; no more struggle with a harsh world for which he feels hopelessly unequipped. Instead love seems to promise protection, support, affection, encouragement, sympathy, understanding. It will give him a feeling of worth. It will