Sadomasochism and Developmental Stages

Though sadism and masochism have been major areas of psychoanalytic concern, the literature on sadism and masochism is full of disagreements and contradictions. It has been debated whether they are determined by instinctual phenomena or by environmental impingement, whether they are discharges of instinctual forces or adaptive responses to objects. A related issue is whether sadism and masochism are intimately connected or are discrete phenomena with only superficial connections. For example, Freud (1905, 1915, 1919, 1920, 1924) continually both ascribes sadism and masochism to the instincts and relates them to each other, only varying on which is primary and which secondary. Numerous others have explicated, expanded, and modified these hypotheses, but adhered basically to the interrelation of sadism and masochism and their instinctual bases (Brenner, 1937; Eissler, 1971; Fenichel, 1945; Gero, 1962; Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein, 1962; Reik, 1940). In contrast, in the last several decades, a new trend has emerged. What is deemed important is the way sadism and masochism are adaptations to the person's environment. Instead of resulting from the aggressive instinct, sadism is seen as a reaction to a love object (Bieber, 1966; Fromm, 1973; Nydes, 1963; Panken, 1973; Siomopoulos and Goldsmith, 1976; Stolorow, 1975). Instead of resulting from a reversal of the aggressive instinct, masochism is seen as a separate phenomenon and as a way of attaining love from another person. The complete solution of these disagreements awaits a better integration of the varying paradigms bordering, suffusing, and confusing psychoanalysis: biological instinctual ones, interpersonal object-relations ones, and humanistic meaning-oriented ones (Kernberg, 1976; Schafer, 1976). However, another obscurity in the literature on sadism and masochism, related to those above, can be clarified: that of the developmental stage at which problems predispose