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This psychoanalytic study entitled “Pleasures from Suffering” tries to answer the question: what demonic forces are at work that tend to destroy the civilization and culture of two millennia? We feel these must be forces stronger than those brought out in conscious life. Treating the problem of masochism the author shows how unconscious impulses of great dynamics are shaping not only the life of single individuals but also the actions and destinies of nations.
In the first chapters he discusses Freud's theories, moral masochism, feminine masochism, erogenous masochism, the origin of masochism, etc.
In the neurotics and psychopathic personalities with asocial traits psychic masochism can be studied as unconscious “push” that causes their own failure in life although on the surface it may seem as if external forces had caused their ruin.
Freud explains masochism as arising from an unconscious wish for self-punishment as a reaction to forbidden desires and impulses.
The unconscious tendency that pushes certain individuals to cheat themselves out of joy and success and to spoil their own chances or not to evaluate them properly, can be accepted as a craving for punishment. During infancy the punishment was expected to come from the parents whose substitute becomes later “God” or “Fate”. That such individuals are hit by a fate shows the connection with childhood experiences when corporal punishment was desired as it brought sexual gratification. Later on in life the punishments that a too rigid Super-Ego has meted out are of various kinds: wrong choice of profession, marital failure, a chain of disappointments in love and social life, etc. In the neuroses as in all actions that wind up in crime the unconscious craving for punishment is active. All that such individuals apparently do for their own benefit does them harm instead and what they omit for caution or other reasons they should have carried out. An internal “push” that is inimical to the “Ego” causes an ultimate fail