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John Munder Ross's The Sadomasochism of Everyday Life is a complex and ambitious work. Beginning with the observation that suffering pervades much of contemporary life, he intends his book to be an exploration of the psychodynamics of sadomasochism targeted for the general public. In this, he succeeds to an important degree even though he also omits systematic consideration of the contributions many analytic thinkers have made to this area of study.
The book's trajectory moves the reader from an awareness of the suffering that exists in contemporary social life (what Ross terms “the crisis of sadomasochism”) to an appreciation of the analytic theory that has been constructed to account for this dimension of human psychology. Ross writes clearly and without jargon, and the book is a very readable account of traditional analytic theory and an attempt to explain how one analyst thinks clinically.
The opening chapters draw the reader in with numerous examples of our everyday immersion in pain and suffering. Ross uses family life, the work place, and popular culture (movies, literature, and song lyrics) to show how sadomasochism sustains many of our social institutions and relationships. He skillfully details the sadomasochistic entanglements that underlie a great many sexual partnerships and marriages, sibling relationships, and close friendships. He succeeds, I think, in establishing for the reader that ordinary love relations are as a matter of course suffused with rivalries, tensions, and hostilities that are never fully resolved.
Throughout the book, Ross tries to show the reader how a great many people often remain attached to discomforts of various kinds even when it is well within a person's ability to improve his or her lot in life. In several extended vignettes, he also illustrates how the roles of victim and victimizer interpenetrate as each comes to identify with the other Using this data, he induces the reader to consider how power plays and other interperso