“I always hurt the one I love—and like it.”: Sadism and a Revised Theory of Aggression*

Psychoanalytic theory considers sadism a manifestation of the aggressive drive Buie, Meissner, Sashin, and Rizzuto have suggested that aggression is not a drive but a motivated psychic capacity to overcome external or internal obstacles that interfere with attainment of the goal of an intended physical or psychical action

The paper reviews the literature on sadism and presents an analytic case to illustrate this theoretical approach. The dynamics of sadistic behaviours and wishes originate in multidetermined motivational sources. The author suggests that at the centre of motivations in sadism there is an internal obstacle the conviction of being unlovable and acceptable as an object Most sadistic behaviours and wishes represent efforts to overcome this internal insurmountable obstacle. The intrapsychic situation created by this internal obstacle calls to action the aggressive capability to carry out internal or external actions to overcome it. The repetition of sadistic actions and fantasies is only a measure of the continuous but ineffective effort to overcome the internal obstacle.

A person who enjoys hurting a loved object is, by definition, sadistic. The individual's hurtful actions, hostile words, destructive and humiliating behaviours, and their accompanying affect of satisfaction led Freud and present-day psychoanalysts to conceive of sadism as a manifestation of an aggressive instinct or drive. This paper applies a revised theory of aggression presented in earlier papers (Buie et al. 1983, 1996, Meissner et al. 1987, and Rizzuto et al. 1993) to the motivational understanding of sadism. It also

proposes a core unconscious fantasy that sustains the many complex sadistic psychic activities and external behaviours.