John Munder Ross's The Sadomasochism of Everyday Life pushes the reader to consider several important issues. It is admirable in its ambition to grapple with and explain clinical and social phenomena that have long confounded psychoanalytic theory and practice. Ross tries to elucidate sadomasochism in ordinary life; its clinical manifestations, including perversions; its origins and functions in the individual and in society; and ways to address it both therapeutically and societally.

The argument of this book is that sadomasochism is endemic to the human condition, universal in development, and ubiquitous in personal and social relationships. The task of development and life is to conquer the temptations of sadomasochism and to resist the pull of regression to what Ross conceptualizes as the inevitable sadomasochistic substratum of the personality: “Because of the nature of infantile sexuality, then, sexual masochism is an inevitable byproduct of desire and frustration” (p. 140).