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Given the dramatic upheavals in present-day culture and the radical alterations in life style that seem to invalidate many traditional criteria of suffering, it is noteworthy that barring few exceptions† the psychoanalytic literature on masochism, whether linked to ego psychology or object relations theory, continues in much the same vein as Freud's landmark contribution, “The Economic Problem in Masochism,”20 of 1924.
Perhaps it is the intensification of sadomasochism at the societal level that has discouraged psychoanalysts from efforts to cope theoretically with these phenomena. Certainly it has become more difficult to decide in what balance the (now so-called) “passive-aggressive personality” mirrors the primary or the secondary environment, nor can we even be certain that this constellation does not, in point of fact, represent a self-preservative adaptation to a culture in rapid transition.40 The failure to achieve “the most out of life,” to establish oneself securely in the economic hierarchy, to integrate successfully in the social structure, is hardly as reliable a gauge of the need for punishment or the desire to fail as it once was. In apparent self-abandonment, Ph.D's turn their backs on academic achievement to drive taxicabs