The Mystery of Masochism: The Masochist Punishes the Undesirable Person Within Himself

Thomas Mann's excellent address on the occasion of Freud's eightieth birthday,1 gives us an opportunity to consider the mythological aspect of our science, to ascertain how this aspect may influence our technic. Mann laid emphasis upon the unconscious mythological figure resident in every one of us. The antique man knew about his myth—the mythological super-individual connected with him who forced him into a mission, as with Cleopatra who knew that she had to live up to her Isis-Astarte myth; Christ who had to live up to the Messiah-myth, or Napoleon, this half-modern, half-antique figure who said about himself that he was Charlemagne.

Mythology in psychoanalysis is not new. The œdipus myth stands more than ever at the adit and exit of the analyst's expectations (Erwartungsvorstellungen). Nor is it a mere piece of coincidence that analysis has employed the names of mythological figures to describe phenomena which are characterized by the regrettable co-name of complexes. The word complex bestows upon these phenomena a sort of scientific connotation, yes, but it bleeds them by depriving them of their life, their incarnation value. We know that no one has an œdipus complex, but every one is somewhere an œdipus; no one has a feminine or masculine complex but he or she represents or impersonates a man, woman, child, devil and saint, tout ensemble, and not in a general sense; it is a definite man, definite woman, child, etc., as in a play. On the hysterical level this becomes quite apparent. The ego of the hysteric disappears behind the bundle of parts which he represents. On the compulsive level everything is more abstract, more conceptions than living figures.

Long before psychoanalysis, William James and Pierre Janet, among others, noticed the tendency of psychological phenomena to assume the shape of unconscious persons.2 We will refer to Janet's famous case, Leonie, later on. Psychoanalysis has acknowledged this