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This collection of papers was written by a group of colleagues working on a long-term basis with severely disturbed inpatients at the Austin Riggs Center in Massachusetts. Some of these patients—deemed masochistic by the authors—presented such difficulties in management and understanding that they became the subject of ongoing study groups and symposia, and ultimately this book. Treatments were highly turbulent, characterized by much acting out, milieu turmoil, therapeutic impasse and crisis, self-destructiveness or provocation of attacks, and intense transference-countertransference reactions. These difficulties, coupled with the perception that the analytic literature did not adequately address them, stimulated the publication of these papers. 'We began to develop a growing dissatisfaction with the standard interpretation of these [masochistic] patients and their behaviors … we found formulations that typically stressed the aggressive component of this behavior, or instinctual gratification and superego retribution, as the primary level of interpretation to be useless if not actually destructive' (p. xiii, my italics).
The statements just quoted illustrate one of the many weaknesses of this book. In dismissing volumes of prior thought on masochism by analytic scholars, the authors (especially the editors) display a tendency to make overly bold and sweeping generalizations and to argue against straw men. For example, currently there is no 'standard interpretation' of masochism. In many, perhaps most modern writings, so-called masochistic phenomena are viewed as quite heterogeneous in origin and nature, highly overdetermined and serving multiple psychic functions (e. g. Blum, 1976); (Maleson, 1984); (Grossman, 1986); (Simons, 1987). There is no single 'masochism'. To further illustrate the straw man tendency, it is stated that 'Traditionally, the literature has assumed the superior capacity of the analyst to formulate insights and to lend these to the patien