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Book Review
Pain and Passion:
A Psychoanalyst Explores the World of S & M
Pain and Passion: A Psychoanalyst Explores the World of S & M , by Robert J. Stoller, M.D. (Plenum Press, 1991)
Reviewed by Charles Socarides, M.D.
Several years before his untimely death in 1991, Robert Stoller, who had previously enriched the psychoanalytic literature on human sexuality with his study of gender origins, began a series of books in which he offered his views on the relation between the sexual acts of the individual, and the social and cultural norms in which the individual was raised. In Pain & Passion he explores the world of consensual sadism and masochism (S & M) by making an expedition to the S & M communities of West Hollywood, California.
He sets forth with several guides--on safari, so to speak-- to jot down the activities of those engaged in the "fetishes and bizarre practices" of both the "casual" and the "devoted" proponents of sadomasochism (i.e., non-obligatory and obligatory sadomasochism). Approximately one-half of his book is devoted to question-and-answer interviews in a nonpsychiatric setting. A number of pages are devoted to listing practices, utensils, and bodily parts used in sadomasochistic performances. There is a six-page listing of the various methods used to inflict pain and humiliation on willing victims, e.g., the different hanging techniques used to achieve orgastic ecstasy from willing participants.
Since Stoller offers no psychoanalytic answers to the meaning behind each particular type of torture, one wonders why this listing is included, especially since many of these activities have been quite aptly described by Krafft-Ebing, by Sacher-Masoch, by the Marquis de Sade, and, even more recently, by the psychoanalyst Benjamin Karpman,{1} who studied criminal sexual psychopaths at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, D.C. The answer to this question may well lie in his comment that "psychoanalysts [should] become less threatened by the pleasures that perversions bring the perverse ..." (p. 38). It seems, therefore, that he is attempting to "desensitize us," as clinicians, to the assumed terror instilled by such activities, so that he can lift the "veil of prejudice and fear" which we presumably hold as clinicians. The remainder of his book consists of a republication of two papers, "Consensual Sadomasochistic Perversion" and "The Term Perversion."
As noted by Richard Green in a "blurb" to this volume, "Stoller's style is between wit and wince." He is indeed lively, witty, brilliant, wry, chiding, humorous, acerbic, confrontational, ambivalent, and contradictory. All this apparently aims to get us to throw off our "deep prejudices" and "name-calling hidden in otherwise decent but understandable concepts favored by psychoanalysts" (p. 19).
One can only agree with Stoller when he says that we should treat individuals suffering from perversions with understanding and compassion. The only problem he has with sadomasochists is when they become engaged in nonconsensual acts where someone is raped or killed. Apparently, he overlooks the fact that all sadomasochistic perversions, voluntarily entered into, are indeed consensual at the beginning but may turn "nonconsensual" when the stakes are raised by either partner in the sudden need for complete ecstatic experience and megalomanic ecstasy.{2}
He repeatedly asserts that it is our "deep prejudices" about the existence of perversion that lead us to feel that perversion is somehow "abnormal." He states that we consider them "monstrous deeds" but that they are really "not as bad as they seem," for these individuals "play at harm" (p. 21). He argues: "Constant high attention to one's partner's experience is more caring, and safer, than the blundering, ignorant, noncommunicating obtuseness that governs so many 'normal' people's erotic notions" (p. 21).
Rationalization of sadomasochistic individuals' practices is a misleading assertion on the part of psychoanalysts who have studied the underlying unconscious motivations leading to these "play action, pseudo-object-relations situations."{3} One can only cite Freud's comment that these individuals are indeed poor souls who must pay a high price for their pleasure as the only way to seek relief from internal conflict{4}, as well as Bak's observation, "perverse symptoms [enactments] are regressive adaptations of the pervert's ego to secure gratification without destroying the object or endangering the self which is identified with the object."{5}
We can agree with Stoller when he says: "By talking in depth with sadomasochists, perhaps we can, in time, come to better explanations and useful ideas for treatment"; but only rarely does Stoller comment upon the causative process of this condition, a finding for which he among others{6} can take considerable credit.
For example, he states, "... there is this factor ... this fantasy system called symbiosis anxiety or merging anxiety, by which I mean that little boys must perform an act of separation from their mothers not required of little girls. This imaginative act established within boys a barrier against the early stage of wanting to stay at home with their mothers--of not being individuals separate from their mothers--and therefore of not being sure that they are fully male" (pp. 41-42). Stoller apparently accepts his own and others' theories of the preoedipal origin of sexual perversions, yet he perplexes the reader by declaring these individuals to be within the realm of "normalcy."
He is dismissive of the seriousness involved: "[Perversions are] ... complex behavior no more worthy of classification than such conditions as suicidal behavior, dislike of zucchini, being a composer, a circus clown, a student, a chiropractor's patient, a golfer, a scholar; or the desire to be a psychoanalyst" (p. 42). This reductio ad absurdum may be quite amusing to the intelligent layman who may well pick up this book, but to the serious beginning student of psychoanalysis, as well as to those who have spent a clinical lifetime in the pursuit of understanding these conditions, it seems inappropriate.
It is laudable that Stoller attempts to remove pejorative insinuations about any form of perverse or disordered behavior. Arlow clarifies the matter as follows:
As scientists, our interest is in understanding the psychodynamics and the genesis of those patters of sexual activity that deviate in considerable degree from the more usual forms of gratification. While it is true that the term perversion in current usage carries the connotation of adverse judgment, the essential meaning is a turning away from the ordinary course. As such, the term perverse is an accurate one. ... The phenomenology of perversion should be approached from a natural science point of view, divorced from any judgmental implications.{7}
I am at a loss to find the logic in Stoller's assertion that psychoanalysts "should know better than to use 'normal' to describe any piece of behavior, for once you determine the underlying structure (i.e., the dynamics or fantasy), normal has no meaning" (p. 35). Freud left no doubt about whether a piece of behavior was to be viewed as a pathological symptom or as normal:
In the majority of instances the pathological character in a perversion is found to lie not in the content of the new sexual aim but in its relation to the normal. If a perversion, instead of appearing merely alongside the normal sexual aim and object, and only when circumstances are unfavorable to them and favorable to it--if, instead of this, it ousts them completely and takes their place in all circumstances--if, in short, a perversion has characteristics of exclusiveness and fixation--then we shall usually be justified in regarding it as a pathological symptom.{8}
Despite my admiration for Stoller's work in gender studies, I find the arguments he presents in favor of viewing sadomasochistic behavior as within the range of normalcy to be elusive and confusing. His chain of argument begins with general statements which seem to be true but are not. Via convincing words, he makes the worse appear to be the better cause. He explains himself as follows: "But is it not an advantage to remove surety and to replace it with a state of reality testing known as ignorance?" (p. 35).
In this book Stoller in large measure follows the path of those behavioral scientists who look at certain phenomena and behaviors as though they have no connection with unconscious motivations. When neither conscious nor unconscious motivation is acknowledged in studies of these perverse individuals, scientists can arrive at the conclusion that the resultant composite of sexual behavior is within the norm. The next step is to demand that the public, the law, medicine, psychiatry, religion, and even psychoanalysis, in a wave of "political correctness," accept this proposition.
This is not a new phenomenon. With remarkable prescience, Lionel Trilling, the social and literary critic, predicted, as early as 1968, as a result of publication of the Kinsey Report, that in the future:
Those who most explicitly assert the wish to practice the democratic virtues [will have taken] a bare assumption that all social facts--with the exception of exclusion and economic hardship--must be accepted not merely in a scientific sense but also in a social sense, in the sense, that is, that no judgment must be passed on them, that any conclusion drawn from them which perceives values and consequences will turn out to be "undemocratic."{9}
Stoller's position on sadomasochism, it should be noted, is in keeping with his long-held views on homosexuality. Against a backdrop of immense popularity and legitimate acclaim as a researcher and writer, his siding with pro-normalization gay activists in the American Psychiatric Association helped deliver a stunning blow to the point of view that obligatory homosexuality is a disorder.
He stated at that time, at the annual meeting of the APA in Honolulu on May 9, 1973, when it was deciding on the removal of homosexuality as a disorder from DSM-II, "There is no such thing as homosexuality and it should be removed from the nomenclature.... There is something disreputable [italics added] in using our feeble method of diagnosis, and psychiatrists en masse, as the whipping boy for the cruel manner in which homosexuals have been and still are treated...."
Stoller concluded, "Why claim that heterosexuality is mankind's preference? The evidence for this as a biological given is certainly flimsy (although I would guess it is innate in some mild, reversible form). Yet, I think, up to the present (but not necessarily forever), heterosexuality has been the norm ... that sets the standard."{10}
In this book Stoller comes through once again as scientist, humanist, and skillful polemicist and
disturber-of-the-peace. But one is left with a disturbing question: Should scientific findings be ordered to meet the demands of social change? Sandor Rado, in his lectures to psychoanalytic students at the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research (1950-1954) stated repeatedly: "Make one exception to science, gentlemen, and you might as well close shop."
FOOTNOTES
{1}Karpman, B. (1954): The Sexual Offender and His Offenses. Etiology, Pathology, Psychodynamics and Treatment. New York: Julian Press.
{2}See De M'Uzan, M. (1973): A case of masochistic perversion and an outline of a theory. Int. J. Psychoanal., 54:455-467.
{3}Kahan, M. M. R. (1965): Intimacy, complicity, and mutuality in perversions. In Alienation in Perversions. New York: Int. Univ. Press, 1979, pp. 18-30.
{4}Freud, S. (1905): Three essays on the theory of sexuality. S.E., 7.
{5}Bak, R. C. (1956): Aggression and perversion. In Perversions: Psychodynamics and Therapy, ed. S. Lorand & M. Balint. New York: Random House, p. 240.
{6}Mahler, M. S., Pine, F. & Bergman, A. (1975): The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. Symbiosis and Individuation. New York: Basic Books.
Socarides, C. W. (1978): Homosexuality. New York: Aronson.
_____ (1979): A unitary theory of sexual perversions. In On Sexuality: Psychonalytic Observations, ed. T. B. Karasu & C. W. Socarides. New York: Int. Univ. Press, pp. 161-188.
_____ (1988): The Preoedipal origin and Psychoanalytic Therapy of Sexual Perversions. Madison, CT: Int. Univ. Press.
{7}Arlow, J. A. (1986): Discussion of papers by Dr. McDougall and Dr. Glasser. Panel on identification in the perversions. Int. J. Psychoanal., 67:249.
{8}Freud, S.: Op. cit., p. 161.
{9}Trilling, L. (1968): The Kinsey Report. In The Liberal Imagination. New York: Scribner, 1976, p. 242.
{10}Stoller, R. J. (1973): Criteria for psychiatric diagnosis. In A Symposium: Should Homosexuality Be in the APA Nomenclature? Amer. J. Psychiat., 130:1208.
(Reprinted from The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. LXIV, No. 2, 1995)
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