The patient distinctly remembers that, at the age of six, without any cause, he had “ideas of violence.” He was compelled to imagine that a servant-girl spread his legs apart and showed his genitals to another; that she tried to throw him into cold or hot water, in order to cause him pain. These “ideas of violence” were attended with lustful feeling, and became the cause of masturbatic manipulations. Later the patient called them up voluntarily, in order to incite himself to masturbation. They also played a part in his dreams; but they never induced pollution, apparently because the patient masturbated excessively during the day.
In time, to these masochistic “ideas of violence,” others of a sadistic nature were added. At first they were scenes in which boys forcibly practiced onanism on one another, or cut off the genitals. He often imagined himself such a boy, now in an active, now in a passive, rôle. Later he busied himself with mental pictures of girls and women that exhibited themselves to one another. He reveled in the thought, for example, of a servant-girl spreading another girl’s legs apart and pulling the genital hair; or in the thought of boys treating girls cruelly, and pricking and pinching their genitals.
Such ideas also always induced sexual excitement, but he never experienced any impulse to carry them out actively or to have them performed on himself passively. It satisfied him to use them for masturbation. Since a year and a half ago, with diminishing sexual imagination and libido, these ideas and impulses had become infrequent, but their content remained unchanged. The masochistic “ideas of violence” predominated over the sadistic. Now, when he sees a lady, he has the thought that she has sexual ideas like his own. In this way, in part, he explains his embarrassment in social intercourse. Owing to the fact that he had heard that he would get rid of his burdensome sexual ideas, if he were to accustom himself to natural sexual indulgence, during the last year and a half he has twice attempted coitus though he only experienced repugnance, and was not confident of success. On both occasions the attempt was a fiasco. The second time he made the attempt, he felt such aversion that he pushed the girl away and fled.The second case is the following one, placed at my disposal by a colleague. Even though it be aphoristic, it seems particularly suited to throw a clear light on the distinctive element of masochism,—the consciousness of subjection, in its peculiar psycho-sexual effect:—
