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The basis for the fascination which the problem of masochism has long held for analysts is too well known to require elaboration. Of the three forms in which he finds this condition, Freud (9) considers what he calls the moral type to be in certain respects the most important. While he implies the ubiquity of its manifestation, he never clearly indicates why it is more prominent in some persons than in others. He does give a clue to the answer to this question, however, in his dynamic formulation of the phenomenon. In explaining moral masochism as the consequence of "the revulsion of sadism against the self …, " he speaks of the "backward-flowing part of the instinct of destruction [which] comes to expression in the ego as intensified masochism"; whereas that part which is "absorbed by the super-ego without any such transformation and increases its sadism against the ego" he characterizes as "rebounding from the outer world." We note first, therefore, that the portion of "the destructive instinctual components" which lodges in the ego, rather than being "turned" in on it, flows back to it in a straight to-and-fro line, as it were. Secondly, in the ego it is "transformed" to create intensified masochism, but by the superego it is "absorbed" to increase its sadism.
To exploit the significance of the hint provided by these distinctions, it would be best to examine smaller entities of human behavior in some detail. The present study is an attempt to do