In the same way it is a mistake to suppose that the very feminine woman is not capable of sadistic tendencies. Even if we take into account the primitive animal conditions of combat, the male must suffer as well as inflict pain, and the female must not only experience subjection to the male, but also share in the emotions of her partner's victory over his rivals. As bearing on these points, I may quote the following remarks written by a lady: "It is said that, the weaker and more feminine a woman is, the greater the subjection she likes. I don't think it has anything at all to do with the general character, but depends entirely on whether the feeling of constraint and helplessness affects her sexually. In men I have several times noticed that those who were most desirous of subjection to the women they loved had, in ordinary life, very strong and determined characters. I know of others, too, who with very weak characters are very imperious toward the women they care for. Among women I have often been surprised to see how a strong, determined woman will give way to a man she loves, and how tenacious of her own will may be some fragile, clinging creature who in daily life seems quite unable to act on her own responsibility. A certain amount of passivity, a desire to have their emotions worked on, seems to me, so far as my small experience goes, very common among ordinary, presumably normal men. A good deal of stress is laid on femininity as an attraction in a woman, and this may be so to very strong natures, but, so far as I have seen, the women who obtain extraordinary empire over men are those with a certain _virility_ in their character and passions. If with this virility they combine a fragility or childishness of appearance which appeals to a man in another way at the same time, they appear to be irresistible."
I have noted some of the feminine traits in De Sade's temperament and appearance. The same may often be noted in sadists whose crimes were very much more serious and brutal than those of De Sade. A man who stabbed women in the streets at St. Louis was a waiter with a high-pitched, effeminate voice and boyish appearance. Reidel, the sadistic murderer, was timid, modest, and delicate; he was too shy to urinate in the presence of other people. A sadistic zoöphilist, described by A. Marie, who attempted to strangle a woman fellow-worker, had always been very timid, blushed with much facility, could not look even children in the eyes, or urinate in the presence of another person, or make sexual advances to women.
Kiernan and Moyer are inclined to connect the modesty and timidity of sadists with a disgust for normal coitus. They were called upon to examine an inverted married woman who had inflicted several hundred wounds, mostly superficial, with forks, scissors, etc., on the genital organs and other parts of a girl whom she had adopted from a "Home." This woman was very prominent in church and social matters in the city in which she lived, so that many clergymen and local persons of importance testified to her chaste, modest, and even prudish character; she was found to be sane at the time of the acts. (Moyer, _Alienist and Neurologist_, May, 1907, and private letter from Dr. Kiernan.)
We are thus led to another sexual perversion, which is usually considered the opposite of sadism. Masochism is commonly regarded as a peculiarly feminine sexual perversion, in women, indeed, as normal in some degree, and in man as a sort of inversion of the normal masculine emotional attitude, but this view of the matter is not altogether justified, for definite and pronounced masochism seems to be much rarer in women than sadism.[88] Krafft-Ebing, whose treatment of this phenomenon is, perhaps, his most valuable and original contribution to sexual psychology, has dealt very fully with the matter and brought forward many cases. He thus defines this perversion: "By masochism I understand a peculiar perversion of the psychical _vita sexualis_ in which the individual affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex, of being treated by this person as by a master, humiliated and abused. This idea is colored by sexual feeling; the masochist lives in fancies in which he creates situations of this kind, and he often attempts to realize them."[89] In a minor degree, not amounting to a complete perversion of the sexual instinct, this sentiment of abnegation, the desire to be even physically subjected to the adored woman, cannot be regarded as abnormal. More than two centuries before Krafft-Ebing appeared, Robert Burton, who was no mean psychologist, dilated on the fact that love is a kind of slavery. "They are commonly slaves," he wrote of lovers, "captives, voluntary servants; _amator amicæ mancipium_, as Castilio terms him; his mistress's servant, her drudge, prisoner, bondman, what not?"[90] Before Burton's time the legend of the erotic servitude of Aristotle was widely spread in Europe, and pictures exist of the venerable philosopher on all fours ridden by a woman with a whip.[91] In classic times various masochistic phenomena are noted with approval by Ovid. It has been pointed out by Moll[92] that there are traces of masochistic feeling in some of Goethe's poems, especially "Lilis Park" and "Erwin und Elmire." Similar traces have been found in the poems of Heine, Platen, Hamerling, and many other poets.[93] The poetry of the people is also said to contain many such traces. It may, indeed, be said that passion in its more lyric exaltations almost necessarily involves some resort to masochistic expression. A popular lady novelist in a novel written many years ago represents her hero, a robust soldier, imploring the lady of his love, in a moment of passionate exaltation, to trample on him, certainly without any wish to suggest sexual perversion. If it is true that the Antonio of Otway's _Venice Preserved_ is a caricature of Shaftesbury, then it would appear that one of the greatest of English statesmen was supposed to exhibit very pronounced and characteristic masochistic tendencies; and in more recent days masochistic expressions have been noted as occurring in the love-letters of so emphatically virile a statesman as Bismarck.
Thus a minor degree of the masochistic tendency may be said to be fairly common, while its more pronounced manifestations are more common than pronounced sadism.[94] It very frequently affects persons of a sensitive, refined, and artistic temperament. It may even be said that this tendency is in the line of civilization. Krafft-Ebing points out that some of the most delicate and romantic love-episodes of the Middle Ages are distinctly colored by masochistic emotion.[95] The increasing tendency to masochism with increasing civilization becomes explicable if we accept Colin Scott's "secondary law of courting" as accessory to the primary law that the male is active, and the female passive and imaginatively attentive to the states of the excited male. According to the secondary law, "the female develops a superadded activity, the male becoming relatively passive and imaginatively attentive to the psychical and bodily states of the female."[96] We may probably agree that this "secondary law of courting" does really represent a tendency of love in individuals of complex and sensitive nature, and the outcome of such a receptive attitude on the part of the male is undoubtedly in well-marked cases a desire of submission to the female's will, and a craving to experience in some physical or psychic form, not necessarily painful, the manifestations of her activity.
When we turn from vague and unpronounced forms of the masochistic tendency to the more definite forms in which it becomes an unquestionable sexual perversion, we find a very eminent and fairly typical example in Rousseau, an example all the more interesting because here the subject has himself portrayed his perversion in his famous _Confessions_. It is, however, the name of a less eminent author, the Austrian novelist, Sacher-Masoch, which has become identified with the perversion through the fact that Krafft-Ebing fixed upon it as furnishing a convenient counterpart to the term "sadism." It is on the strength of a considerable number of his novels and stories, more especially of _Die Venus im Pelz_, that Krafft-Ebing took the scarcely warrantable liberty of identifying his name, while yet living, with a sexual perversion.
Sacher-Masoch's biography has been written with intimate knowledge and much candor by C.F. von Schlichtegroll (_Sacher-Masoch und der Masochismus_, 1901) and, more indirectly, by his first wife Wanda von Sacher-Masoch in her autobiography (_Meine Lebensbeichte_, 1906; French translation, _Confession de ma Vie_, 1907). Schlichtegroll's book is written with a somewhat undue attempt to exalt his hero and to attribute his misfortunes to his first wife. The autobiography of the latter, however, enables us to form a more complete picture of Sacher-Masoch's life, for, while his wife by no means spares herself, she clearly shows that Sacher-Masoch was the victim of his own abnormal temperament, and she presents both the sensitive, refined, exalted, and generous aspects of his nature, and his morbid, imaginative, vain aspects.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in 1836 at Lemberg in Galicia. He was of Spanish, German, and more especially Slavonic race. The founder of the family may be said to be a certain Don Matthias Sacher, a young Spanish nobleman, in the sixteenth century, who settled in Prague. The novelist's father was director of police in Lemberg and married Charlotte von Masoch, a Little Russian lady of noble birth. The novelist, the eldest child of this union, was not born until after nine years of marriage, and in infancy was so delicate that he was not expected to survive. He began to improve, however, when his mother gave him to be suckled to a robust Russian peasant woman, from whom, as he said later, he gained not only health, but "his soul"; from her he learned all the strange and melancholy legends of her people and a love of the Little Russians which never left him. While still a child young Sacher-Masoch was in the midst of the bloody scenes of the revolution which culminated in 1848. When he was 12 the family migrated to Prague, and the boy, though precocious in his development, then first learned the German language, of which he attained so fine a mastery. At a very early age he had found the atmosphere, and even some of the most characteristic elements, of the peculiar types which mark his work as a novelist.
It is interesting to trace the germinal elements of those peculiarities which so strongly affected his imagination on the sexual side. As a child, he was greatly attracted by representations of cruelty; he loved to gaze at pictures of executions, the legends of martyrs were his favorite reading, and with the onset of puberty he regularly dreamed that he was fettered and in the power of a cruel woman who tortured him. It has been said by an anonymous author that the women of Galicia either rule their husbands entirely and make them their slaves or themselves sink to be the wretchedest of slaves. At the age of 10, according to Schlichtegroll's narrative, the child Leopold witnessed a scene in which a woman of the former kind, a certain Countess Xenobia X., a relative of his own on the paternal side, played the chief part, and this scene left an undying impress on his imagination. The Countess was a beautiful but wanton creature, and the child adored her, impressed alike by her beauty and the costly furs she wore. She accepted his devotion and little services and would sometimes allow him to assist her in dressing; on one occasion, as he was kneeling before her to put on her ermine slippers, he kissed her feet; she smiled and gave him a kick which filled him with pleasure. Not long afterward occurred the episode which so profoundly affected his imagination. He was playing with his sisters at hide-and-seek and had carefully hidden himself behind the dresses on a clothes-rail in the Countess's bedroom. At this moment the Countess suddenly entered the house and ascended the stairs, followed by a lover, and the child, who dared not betray his presence, saw the countess sink down on a sofa and begin to caress her lover. But a few moments later the husband, accompanied by two friends, dashed into the room. Before, however, he could decide which of the lovers to turn against the Countess had risen and struck him so powerful a blow in the face with her fist that he fell back streaming with blood. She then seized a whip, drove all three men out of the room, and in the confusion the lover slipped away. At this moment the clothes-rail fell and the child, the involuntary witness of the scene, was revealed to the Countess, who now fell on him in anger, threw him to the ground, pressed her knee on his shoulder, and struck him unmercifully. The pain was great, and yet he was conscious of a strange pleasure. While this castigation was proceeding the Count returned, no longer in a rage, but meek and humble as a slave, and kneeled down before her to beg forgiveness. As the boy escaped he saw her kick her husband. The child could not resist the temptation to return to the spot; the door was closed and he could see nothing, but he heard the sound of the whip and the groans of the Count beneath his wife's blows.
It is unnecessary to insist that in this scene, acting on a highly sensitive and somewhat peculiar child, we have the key to the emotional attitude which affected so much of Sacher-Masoch's work. As his biographer remarks, woman became to him, during a considerable part of his life, a creature at once to be loved and hated, a being whose beauty and brutality enabled her to set her foot at will on the necks of men, and in the heroine of his first important novel, the _Emissär_, dealing with the Polish Revolution, he embodied the contradictory personality of Countess Xenobia. Even the whip and the fur garments, Sacher-Masoch's favorite emotional symbols, find their explanation in this early episode. He was accustomed to say of an attractive woman: "I should like to see her in furs," and, of an unattractive woman: "I could not imagine her in furs." His writing-paper at one time was adorned with the figure of a woman in Russian Boyar costume, her cloak lined with ermine, and brandishing a scourge. On his walls he liked to have pictures of women in furs, of the kind of which there is so magnificent an example by Rubens in the gallery at Munich. He would even keep a woman's fur cloak on an ottoman in his study and stroke it from time to time, finding that his brain thus received the same kind of stimulation as Schiller found in the odor of rotten apples.[97] At the age of 13, in the revolution of 1848, young Sacher-Masoch received his baptism of fire; carried away in the popular movement, he helped to defend the barricades together with a young lady, a relative of his family, an amazon with a pistol in her girdle, such as later he loved to depict. This episode was, however, but a brief interruption of his education; he pursued his studies with brilliance, and on the higher side his education was aided by his father's esthetic tastes. Amateur theatricals were in special favor at his home, and here even the serious plays of Goethe and Gogol were performed, thus helping to train and direct the boy's taste. It is, perhaps, however, significant that it was a tragic event which, at the age of 16, first brought to him the full realization of life and the consciousness of his own power. This was the sudden death of his favorite sister. He became serious and quiet, and always regarded this grief as a turning-point in his life.
At the Universities of Prague and Graz he studied with such zeal that when only 19 he took his doctor's degree in law and shortly afterward became a _privatdocent_ for German history at Graz. Gradually, however, the charms of literature asserted themselves definitely, and he soon abandoned teaching. He took part, however, in the war of 1866 in Italy, and at the battle of Solferino he was decorated on the field for bravery in action by the Austrian field-marshal. These incidents, however, had little disturbing influence on Sacher-Masoch's literary career, and he was gradually acquiring a European reputation by his novels and stories.
A far more seriously disturbing influence had already begun to be exerted on his life by a series of love-episodes. Some of these were of slight and ephemeral character; some were a source of unalloyed happiness, all the more so if there was an element of extravagance to appeal to his Quixotic nature. He always longed to give a dramatic and romantic character to his life, his wife says, and he spent some blissful days on an occasion when he ran away to Florence with a Russian princess as her private secretary. Most often these episodes culminated in deception and misery. It was after a relationship of this kind from which he could not free himself for four years that he wrote _Die Geschiedene Frau, Passionsgeschichte eines Idealisten_, putting into it much of his own personal history. At one time he was engaged to a sweet and charming young girl. Then it was that he met a young woman at Graz, Laura Rümelin, 27 years of age, engaged as a glove-maker, and living with her mother. Though of poor parentage, with little or no knowledge of the world, she had great natural ability and intelligence. Schlichtegroll represents her as spontaneously engaging in a mysterious intrigue with the novelist. Her own detailed narrative renders the circumstances more intelligible. She approached Sacher-Masoch by letter, adopting for disguise the name of his heroine Wanda von Dunajev, in order to recover possession of some compromising letters which had been written to him, as a joke, by a friend of hers. Sacher-Masoch insisted on seeing his correspondent before returning the letters, and with his eager thirst for romantic adventure he imagined that she was a married woman of the aristocratic world, probably a Russian countess, whose simple costume was a disguise. Not anxious to reveal the prosaic facts, she humored him in his imaginations and a web of mystification was thus formed. A strong attraction grew up on both sides and, though for some time Laura Rümelin maintained the mystery and held herself aloof from him, a relationship was formed and a child born. Thereupon, in 1893, they married. Before long, however, there was disillusion on both sides. She began to detect the morbid, chimerical, and unpractical aspects of his character, and he realized that not only was his wife not an aristocrat, but, what was of more importance to him, she was by no means the domineering heroine of his dreams. Soon after marriage, in the course of an innocent romp in which the whole of the small household took part, he asked his wife to inflict a whipping on him. She refused, and he thereupon suggested that the servant should do it; the wife failed to take this idea seriously; but he had it carried out, with great satisfaction at the severity of the castigation he received. When, however, his wife explained to him that, after this incident, it was impossible for the servant to stay, Sacher-Masoch quite agreed and she was at once discharged. But he constantly found pleasure in placing his wife in awkward or compromising circumstances, a pleasure she was too normal to share. This necessarily led to much domestic wretchedness. He had persuaded her, against her wish, to whip him nearly every day, with whips which he devised, having nails attached to them. He found this a stimulant to his literary work, and it enabled him to dispense in his novels with his stereotyped heroine who is always engaged in subjugating men, for, as he explained to his wife, when he had the reality in his life he was no longer obsessed by it in his imaginative dreams. Not content with this, however, he was constantly desirous for his wife to be unfaithful. He even put an advertisement in a newspaper to the effect that a young and beautiful woman desired to make the acquaintance of an energetic man. The wife, however, though she wished to please her husband, was not anxious to do so to this extent. She went to an hotel by appointment to meet a stranger who had answered this advertisement, but when she had explained to him the state of affairs he chivalrously conducted her home. It was some time before Sacher-Masoch eventually succeeded in rendering his wife unfaithful. He attended to the minutest details of her toilette on this occasion, and as he bade her farewell at the door he exclaimed: "How I envy him!" This episode thoroughly humiliated the wife, and from that moment her love for her husband turned to hate. A final separation was only a question of time. Sacher-Masoch formed a relationship with Hulda Meister, who had come to act as secretary and translator to him, while his wife became attached to Rosenthal, a clever journalist later known to readers of the _Figaro_ as "Jacques St.-Cère," who realized her painful position and felt sympathy and affection for her. She went to live with him in Paris and, having refused to divorce her husband, he eventually obtained a divorce from her; she states, however, that she never at any time had physical relationships with Rosenthal, who was a man of fragile organization and health. Sacher-Masoch united himself to Hulda Meister, who is described by the first wife as a prim and faded but coquettish old maid, and by the biographer as a highly accomplished and gentle woman, who cared for him with almost maternal devotion. No doubt there is truth in both descriptions. It must be noted that, as Wanda clearly shows, apart from his abnormal sexual temperament, Sacher-Masoch was kind and sympathetic, and he was strongly attached to his eldest child. Eulenburg also quotes the statement of a distinguished Austrian woman writer acquainted with him that, "apart from his sexual eccentricities, he was an amiable, simple, and sympathetic man with a touchingly tender love for his children." He had very few needs, did not drink or smoke, and though he liked to put the woman he was attached to in rich furs and fantastically gorgeous raiment he dressed himself with extreme simplicity. His wife quotes the saying of another woman that he was as simple as a child and as naughty as a monkey.
In 1883 Sacher-Masoch and Hulda Meister settled in Lindheim, a village in Germany near the Taunus, a spot to which the novelist seems to have been attached because in the grounds of his little estate was a haunted and ruined tower associated with a tragic medieval episode. Here, after many legal delays, Sacher-Masoch was able to render his union with Hulda Meister legitimate; here two children were in due course born, and here the novelist spent the remaining years of his life in comparative peace. At first, as is usual, treated with suspicion by the peasants, Sacher-Masoch gradually acquired great influence over them; he became a kind of Tolstoy in the rural life around him, the friend and confidant of all the villagers (something of Tolstoy's communism is also, it appears, to be seen in the books he wrote at this time), while the theatrical performances which he inaugurated, and in which his wife took an active part, spread the fame of the household in many neighboring villages. Meanwhile his health began to break up; a visit to Nauheim in 1894 was of no benefit, and he died March 9, 1895.
A careful consideration of the phenomena of sadism and masochism may be said to lead us to the conclusion that there is no real line of demarcation. Even De Sade himself was not a pure sadist, as Bloch's careful definition is alone sufficient to indicate; it might even be argued that De Sade was really a masochist; the investigation of histories of sadism and masochism, even those given by Krafft-Ebing (as, indeed, Colin Scott and Féré have already pointed out), constantly reveals traces of both groups of phenomena in the same individual. They cannot, therefore, be regarded as opposed manifestations. This has been felt by some writers, who have, in consequence, proposed other names more clearly indicating the relationship of the phenomena. Féré speaks of sexual algophily[98]; he only applies the term to masochism; it might equally well be applied to sadism. Schrenck-Notzing, to cover both sadism and masochism, has invented the term algolagnia (algos, pain, and lagnos sexually excited), and calls the former active, the latter passive, algolagnia.[99] Eulenburg has also emphasized the close connection between these groups of perverted sexual manifestations, and has adopted the same terms, adding the further group of ideal (illusionary) algolagnia, to cover the cases in which the mere autosuggestive representation of pain, inflicted or suffered, suffices to give sexual gratification.[100] A brief discussion of the terms "sadism" and "masochism" has imposed itself upon us at this point because as soon as, in any study of the relationship between love and pain, we pass over the limits of normal manifestations into a region which is more or less abnormal, these two conceptions are always brought before us, and it was necessary to show on what grounds they are here rejected as the pivots on which the discussion ought to turn. We may accept them as useful terms to indicate two groups of clinical phenomena; but we cannot regard them as of any real scientific value. Having reached this result, we may continue our consideration of the love-bite, as the normal manifestation of the connection between love and pain which most naturally leads us across the frontier of the abnormal.
The result of the love-bite in its extreme degree is to shed blood. This cannot be regarded as the direct aim of the bite in its normal manifestations, for the mingled feelings of close contact, of passionate gripping, of symbolic devouring, which constitute the emotional accompaniments of the bite would be too violently discomposed by actual wounding and real shedding of blood. With some persons, however, perhaps more especially women, the love-bite is really associated with a conscious desire, even if more or less restrained, to draw blood, a real delight in this process, a love of blood. Probably this only occurs in persons who are not absolutely normal, but on the borderland of the abnormal. We have to admit that this craving has, however, a perfectly normal basis. There is scarcely any natural object with so profoundly emotional an effect as blood, and it is very easy to understand why this should be so.[101] Moreover, blood enters into the sphere of courtship by virtue of the same conditions by which cruelty enters into it; they are both accidents of combat, and combat is of the very essence of animal and primitive human courtship, certainly its most frequent accompaniment. So that the repelling or attracting fascination of blood may be regarded as a by-product of normal courtship, which, like other such by-products, may become an essential element of abnormal courtship.[102] Normally the fascination of blood, if present at all during sexual excitement, remains more or less latent, either because it is weak or because the checks that inhibit it are inevitably very powerful. Occasionally it becomes more clearly manifest, and this may happen early in life. Féré records the case of a man of Anglo-Saxon origin, of sound heredity so far as could be ascertained and presenting no obvious stigmata of degeneration, who first experienced sexual manifestations at the age of 5 when a boy cousin was attacked by bleeding at the nose. It was the first time he had seen such a thing and he experienced erection and much pleasure at the sight. This was repeated the next time the cousin's nose bled and also whenever he witnessed any injuries or wounds, especially when occurring in males. A few years later he began to find pleasure in pinching and otherwise inflicting slight suffering. This sadism was not, however, further developed, although a tendency to inversion persisted.[103] Somewhat similar may have been the origin of the attraction of blood in a case which has been reported to me of a youth of 17, the youngest of a large family who are all very strong and entirely normal. He is himself, however, delicate, overgrown, with a narrow chest, a small head, and babyish features, while mentally he is backward, with very defective memory and scant powers of assimilation. He is intensely nervous, peevish, and subject to fits of childish rage. He takes violent fancies to persons of his own sex. But he appears to have only one way of obtaining sexual excitement and gratification. It is his custom to get into a hot bath and there to produce erection and emission, not by masturbation, but by thinking of flowing blood. He does not associate himself with the causation of this imaginary flow of blood; he is merely the passive but pleased spectator. He is aware of his peculiarity and endeavors to shake it off, but his efforts to obtain normal pleasure by thinking of a girl are vain.
I may here narrate a case which has been communicated to me of algolagnia in a woman, combined with sexual hyperesthesia.
R.D., aged 25, married, and of good social position; she is a small and dark woman, restless and alert in manner. She has one child.
She has practised masturbation from an early age--ever since she can remember--by the method of external friction and pressure. From the age of 17 she was able (and is still) to produce the orgasm almost without effort, by calling up the image of any man who had struck her fancy. She has often done so while seated talking to such a man, even when he is almost a stranger; in doing it, she says, a tightening of the muscles of the thighs and the slightest movement are sufficient. Ugly men (if not deformed), as well as men with the reputation of being _roués_, greatly excite her sexually, more especially if of good social position, though this is not essential.
At the age of 18 she became hysterical, probably, she herself believes, in consequence of a great increase at that time of indulgence in masturbation. The doctors, apparently suspecting her habits, urged her parents to get her married early. She married, at the age of 20, a man about twice her own age.
As a child (and in a less degree still) she was very fond of watching dog-fights. This spectacle produced strong sexual feelings and usually orgasm, especially if much blood was shed during the fight. Clean cuts and wounds greatly attract her, whether on herself or a man. She has frequently slightly cut or scratched herself "to see the blood," and likes to suck the wound, thinking the taste "delicious." This produces strong sexual feelings and often orgasm, especially if at the time she thinks of some attractive man and imagines that she is sucking his blood. The sight of injury to a woman only very slightly affects her, and that, she thinks, only because of an involuntary association of ideas. Nor has the sight of suffering in illness any exciting effects, only that which is due to violence, and when there is a visible cause for the suffering, such as cuts and wounds. (Bruises, from the absence of blood, have only a slight effect.) The excitement is intensified if she imagines that she has herself inflicted the injury. She likes to imagine that the man wished to rape her, and that she fought him in order to make him more greatly value her favor, so wounding him.