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In a field dedicated to the understanding of the complex and seemingly inexplicable in human motivation and behavior, psychoanalysis has perhaps encountered its greatest challenge and its most enigmatic phenomenon in masochism. For what could possibly motivate an individual to do everything possible to heap suffering upon himself and counter his own best interests? The answer to this question has haunted psychoanalysts beginning with Freud and has resulted in a large, multifaceted literature—unfortunately too much of it bordering on nonsense. Encountering seemingly intractable patients, unyielding to the best of interpretations, analysts with Freud starting the trend have reverted to intricate metapsychological and at times metaphysical explanations. These have too often substituted for true understanding.
Yet, with ungrudging toil in such seemingly barren soil, some latterday analysts have yielded in journal articles rather fruitful ideas on the psychology and therapy of masochism. Now comes a major attempt at a comprehensive, scholarly clinical approach to the whole phenomenon of masochism by Shirley Panken. Because of important contributions over the last twenty-five years, it is clearly a subject ripe for such an undertaking and perhaps even a few years past due.
To get into the book, we must first get past its title, The Joy of Suffering. It is particularly inappropriate because it runs entirely counter