Reply to Dimen

In my essay “Adaptive Sadomasochism and Psychological Growth,” I attempted to show, through two detailed case presentations, how some playful forms of sadomasochistic sexual fantasy and ritual can function as progressive psychological moves in a heterosexual relationship. I felt that this was worth exploring, given the bias within psychoanalytic theory to regard sadomasochistic fantasy as mainly a pathological compromise formation. Second, I felt that, with the exception of Jessica Benjamin, feminist theory had not adequately understood, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, the meaning of those relatively healthy instances of sadomasochistic sexual fantasy and play in the lives of some heterosexual men and women. My interest was in exploring this phenomenon of “healthy” sadomasochism at a level that was clinically rich and stayed close to the actual subjective experience of the parties involved, since this kind of detailed narrative and clinical analysis is generally missing from a literature that can easily become polemical, partisan, and politically heated.

Muriel Dimen wishes I had written a different paper, one that dealt with issues that are more interesting to her. She is, for instance, extremely interested in language and in the deconstruction of the meaning of my (clearly) vernacular use of such terms as “consensual,” “intuitively,” and “truly weak.” As Dimen repeatedly indicates, while the vernacular meaning is clear to her and the general reader (e.g., by “consensual” I mean “without force”), she is more interested in such issues as whether true consent is possible for heterosexual women within patriarchy, the possible preoedipal roots of intuition, or the relationship of my ideas to Winnicott's notions of the true and false self. I share these interests with Dimen and hope at some future time to contribute to a deeper understanding of them.

My interest in this paper, however, was to use an experience-near understanding of the intrapsychic meanings of sado