A Tentative Formulation of the Origin of Sadomasochism

It has been tentatively postulated by several investigators that the root of sadism is to be found essentially in the pleasure the infant derives from biting the mother's nipple during the latter part of the nursing epoch. If this holds true in principle, it would then seem logical that the infant's biting with the lips which antedates the presence of teeth would be an even earlier phase of this process. To go back still further, the infant's very desire to engulf or absorb the mother within its own person would seem to be the precedent logical root of sadism, for no doubt this is but a still more vague attempt on the part of the infantile organism to recapture the status quo first disequilibrated by the fetal separation from the parental stem. In following such instinctive impulses to their source, perhaps one is apt to place too much stress upon repetitive compulsion phenomena per se.

In some languages, notably the Dutch and the German, provision is made for two distinct entities: one word ordinarily used to designate the mother as a person or an agent (equally applicable to any agency or barrier that calls for the deflection or suppression of the pleasure principle in the autoerotic act of nursing), and another for the breast of the mother, “mamma “(Starcke). The distinction is of more than academic interest inasmuch as the infant would seem to consider the organic mother as a part of itself which is taken from it by the mother as a person. It is toward the mother as a person, therefore, that it directs its distrust and hostility, and perhaps hate, because the mother has deprived the infant of this part of itself, the “mamma. “Hence the infant probably experiences the feelings of loneliness and dejection, and becomes aware of its “smallness and weakness “from this beginning of an outer world from which the child always feels more or less estranged. But perhaps it may be felt no more poignantly than a feeling of severed relations and yearning for a reestablished un