Quoted By:
Now, do you realize many sadists want nothing more than that their victim should enjoy the pain? The combination sadist and masochist is perfect. And many sadists would be quite reluctant if the victim really didn’t like participating in this at all. And so there’s the joke of the masochist asking the sadist to beat him and he says, I won’t. But what happens here is that pain, and the attendant convulsive behavior of the organism, is associated with the erotic. A different value is given to the same symptoms as, say, it is common in France to get a young woman really aroused, you know? And she will say, Tue-moi! Tue-moi!—Kill me! Kill me! As if, you know, to go as far as you can in throwing yourself away to somebody else, you know? Do anything you want to. And in that abandon, you see, there is the possibility that this—an undulation of feeling, which is total orgiastic feeling—may take over. And in that feeling, you see, you are one with what is happening; completely. And that’s what everybody, as it were, finally aspires to.
So therefore—the masochist, in particular—is a person who has learned throughout life to defend himself against pain by eroticizing pain. Now, do you understand how, therefore, different valuations can be put on one and the same vibration?
