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The following is the author's summary: 'A thirty-year-old patient with a masochistic perversion meets with various slights from his business superiors: his work is monotonous, his capabilities are not utilized. All this the patient suffers patiently and offers no defence. He is conscious that it is a question of putting up with it. He knows that other men lead a different and a happy life. In the analysis it is possible to shew the patient that this ill-fortune does not, as he asserts, proceed from his environment without any contribution on his own part, but that he has himself provoked it by his own behaviour. He only enjoys self-created misfortune; every other type he carefully avoids. This mechanism which I call the " masochistic mechanism " allows the patient to render harmless deprivations proceeding from the environment, in that he creates them actively instead of enduring them passively. When this mechanism has become conscious and when it has been worked through for some long time it loses its effect. Self-created discomfitures can only be substituted for the real as long as they appear real to the patient's conscious mind. This " masochistic mechanism" belongs metapsychologically to such already familiar mechanisms as projection, introjection, repression and reaction formation. Whether all or only some masochists shew it can only be decided on the evidence of analysis of numerous cases.'
'Four technical problems were brought forward as important for these cases: the significance of discussion, ' (i.e. first asking for the surrender of reason or of critical judgment in order to gain unconscious material, then when this material threatens to be overwhelming calling for the application of reason to the problem) 'the failure of the masochistic satisfaction, the overthrow of megalomania through the attitude of the analyst' (i.e. towards intense provocation on the part of the patient issuing from his feeling of omnipotence to create a masochistic sit