Sexual Masochism: A Case Report

The data presented in this paper give further support to the growing conviction about the important role of early pre-oedipal trauma and disturbed object relationships in the development of such conditions as the perversions. Freud, in his 'Three Essays on Sexuality', and numerous other authors since then have stressed the importance of very early mother–child fixations and strong primary identifications with the mother in the development of these disorders.

The early process of differentiation and separation of self from non-self is made particularly difficult for the infant whose mother suffers from an excess of separation anxiety, strong anal fixations, penis envy and phallic drives. Such a mother to some extent unconsciously perceives her child as a representation of her own mother and tenaciously clings to it. She rationalizes her need to exert excessive control over it and its body functions. She insinuates herself into the child through the sense organs and finds justification to invade it through its body openings. The child's experiences of being possessed and penetrated, accompanied by pain and fear of annihilation, alternate with rejections and anxious separations. The anxious, helpless child, having become so strongly identified with its mother, attempts to relieve its separation anxiety by clinging to her and to objects intimately associated with her. Finding itself unable to succeed in this, the child creates substitute representations of the intimate, symbiotic mother–child union. This is done through the employment of fantasies of the need-satisfying object and auto-erotic activities utilizing parts of its own body and objects familiar to both the mother and the child. The particular nature of these auto-erotic activities of childhood and the corresponding later perversions of adult life seem to be largely determined by the nature of the mother's pre-oedipal fixations and perverse behaviour with the child.

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