9. The Retreat from Aesthetic Conflict: Cynicism, Perversity and the Vulgarisation of Taste

Freud's discovery of the key to masochism, which he described so wonderfully in ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, awaited the recognition by Melanie Klein of the mechanism (phantasy) of projective identification to give it clear clinical application. The deviousness of the masochistic manoeuvre and its close connection with virginal anxieties leaves very little doubt that when in the fixed pattern (rather than its reversible form of sado-masochism), whether of sexual perversity or of more social and moral variants (or extrapolations), it is the masochist whose phantasy life calls the tune. By its nature, masochistic longing easily finds its partner, because brutality is so common a feature in character or so easily provoked. But more important than this ease of enactment, is the fact that the participation of the sadist does not require so complex a phantasy but lends itself to the simple acting out of the social processes of our hierarchic structures, based as they are on tyranny and submission, privilege and obedience.

The masochistic manoeuvre, then, involves a complicated process of splitting and projective identification, similar to that found in the hypochondriac and depressive states. The primal (infantile) phantasy is, as Freud discovered, that a (rival) child is being beaten (to death). In the enactment of this phantasy, through splitting and projective identification with the mother-containing-the-new-baby, the masochist enjoys (as observer) a double role, of both mother and baby. He/she, the observer, enjoys vicariously, as in a film, the spectacle of a mother submitting to a brutal sexual assault, ranging from rape to so-called love-making, in which the baby is destroyed (aborted, miscarried). The drama may be augmented in its interest by ambiguity in the motives of the mother, cf. to sacrifice one child to save the others (Sophie's Choice) or to save herself (Mother Courage?). Further entertaining complications can be introduced by the observer entering into th