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“I win by suffering” explains Marjorie, a 38-year-old married woman. She is a type (man or woman) commonly called a masochist, a person with a preference for experiences of or a whole life of suffering, a person reputed to derive pleasure from his or her pain (Panken, 1973).
This woman, however, is someone whose pain in my view is a consequence of a way of life, not a goal. This is one fundamental point of this paper.
My patient has more than once said: “Jesus, I wish I could discover anything good about myself except that ‘I can take it.’” She implies she can bear misery better than most people, but she is not openly boasting. She also has several times said, “I wish I could go to pieces,” suggesting a desire to terminate the painfulness of her existence by going crazy. She often has had the wish to commit suicide, another effective strategy for ending having to “take it.”
From my point of view, the behavior of this woman and others like her is not a pursuit of suffering. Rather, their pain is an inevitable product of their particular manner of relating. The pain is the pain of low self-esteem.1 It is I believe a sense of never living with an adequate development of one's personality nor of having an ongoing growth of one's positive potentials. The attempts to overcome low self-esteem are chiefly competitive. They involve achieving the gratification and stimulus of winning, of outdoing. Often the competitive behavior is a controlling activity.
With the vague insight inherent in, “I win by suffering,” my patient began after months in analysis to discover the broad dimensions of her competitiveness. In that psychoanalytic hour she suddenly brightened with the insightful feeling that she was able to suffer all the malice from other people and the hurtful forces