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IN HIS INTRODUCTION, ROTHSTEIN NOTED that the present panel, in inquiring into the relation between masochism and depression, follows the suggestion made in an earlier panel by Arnold Cooper: that it is now appropriate to devote a period of exploration to masochism, as has been done for narcissism.
Rothstein observed, in his literature review, differences in emphasis between oedipal versus preoedipal, and biologic versus psychodynamic considerations. Freud made no specific comment relating the two. His contributions regarding depression are an extension of the construct of narcissistic drive. Freud stressed that depression resulted from narcissistic injury due to object loss, compensated for by an identification, on which the "critical activity of the ego" then discharged its "sadism and hate." Confusion derives from the attempt to understand the relation between depression, which most analysts consider to result from oral or preoedipal deprivation, and the superego, which most think of as "heir to the Oedipus complex."
Although Freud's earliest work on masochism was within the pleasure principle, he definitively explained masochism by resorting to the death instinct, a hypothesis strongly influenced by biological considerations. He distinguished "an erotogenic, a feminine, and a moral masochism," the erotogenic form being fundamental to the others, and the psychical derivative of the death instinct. Yet in descriptions of clinical aspects of masochistic fantasies his emphasis was clearly oedipal.