Masochism as the Guardian of Life

We owe this concept to Benno Rosenberg (1991), who clearly highlighted masochism's function as a guardian of life. Starting from erotogenic masochism and from its primordial form, primary erotogenic masochism - the source of all the others - Rosenberg made it the specific expression of the process of drive fusion with which it is indistinguishable and of which it is the result. Its presence at the heart of every psychic phenomenon was evidence for him of the “masochistic dimension of existence” for, owing to its effect of binding the drives, masochism is in the service of the life drive.

This conceptualisation is an extension of Freud's (1924) discovery in “The economic problem of masochism”, where he recognised the “scandal” that pain, considered as an object of satisfaction in itself, represented for rationalised thought and morality. Freud was then obliged to modify his first drive theory in which the discharge of the tension of excitation was considered as a source of pleasure: he replaced this short path centred on the quantitative factor with along path of psychic elaboration involving masochism and the capacity that it implies to endure the tension of unpleasure. This was the famous “turning-point of 1920”, paving the way for the second drive theory in which a nuanced principle of pleasure reigns, placed under the aegis of a qualitative factor that is articulated with the reality principle by integrating temporality, waiting and endurance, in which masochism plays a present and vital role. But, before a new metapsychological ensemble could be organised, Freud had to be bold enough to advance the hypothesis of a death drive operating against the interests of the ego, and which was therefore the antagonist of the life drives. The vital necessity of taming these drives of destruction would be the task of Eros, tasked with a work of binding or fusion through masochism, a work of vital alloying that would ensure the necessary “eroticization” of destructiveness by m