Sado-Masochism has much in common with the elusive, lesser spotted Venus Fly Trap Warbler. They both have fancy names and are so well camouflaged that even the ardent enthusiast rarely gets a peek. Danish philosopher and leading contender for the Worst-luck-in-love Competition, Soren Kierkegaard, who also had a fancy name, tells the following cautionary tale ….
There was once a poor peasant who was so down on his luck he did not even have a pair of shoes to wear.
One day, he miraculously came into some money. He walked all the way into town and bought the finest pair of shoes he could find. There was even some money left over. So he bought a jug of wine and drank it on the way home.
Before he could return, the wine got the better of him. He fell into a ditch where he passed out. In the small hours of the morning a coach came by. The coachman sees the peasant’s legs dangling out of the ditch across the road and he calls out loudly lest they be run over. The peasant raises a bleary eye, looks carefully at his newly shod feet and shouts back, ‘they’re not my legs, drive on!’
Since S/M is about what happens between people it would be better to say that it is a perversion of the Principle of Relatedness, of which sexual relatedness is only a part. The flamboyant/erotic end of the spectrum may well catch our attention but many S/M enactments are of the common or garden varieties and don’t make for interesting TV.
Nor is it enough to then say that S/M is rooted in dominance and subordination. These are expressions of and adaptations to something more fundamental which is still worth naming.
The child of any epoch or culture instinctively maintains the conditions in which it has learned to be at home. If disconnection and split realities are the world we are born into then even these…
”will be maintained indiscriminately as part of development.” Jean Liedloff
This relational dysfunction is much bigger than the sexual issues they might later encompass.
Narcissistic sadism has, as its prime objective, the eradication of the other’s subjective reality. Its means to that end is depersonalization, humiliation, witholding and the refusal to value or accommodate. His doing-unto-others denies and projects a fragile core. I wound therefore I am…
not my wound.
Empathic masochism dovetails this with low self worth, poor boundaries and subliminal victim mentality that colludes with and allows the sadist’s ‘bad behavior’. Power and responsibility are abdicated so Identity can take root in being done to.
”They are not my legs, ride on!”
The problem for the poor peasant is that if his poverty constitutes a nucleus of identity, a core self-construct, then the resolution of it will precipitate existential crisis. He won’t know who he is anymore. Resolving ‘the problem’, is therefor out of the frying pan…
and into the fire.
”Once you have identified with some form of negativity you do not want to let it go and on a deeply unconscious level, do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry or hard done-by person. Eckhart Tolle.
So we resist what we want most because it costs us what we know of ourselves to have it.
”For someone who’s natural habitat is the brink of disaster, a giant step into security is as intolerable as the realization of all he fears most.” Jean Liedloff.
Our peasant’s new shoes threaten his whole view of life. He cannot afford to identify with his own good fortune. Having his legs run over would reacquaint him with his familiar bad luck upon which identity has long been constructed.
Moreover, the miracle of his wild adventure into town has the quality of a hero’s quest, part of which is invariably death/rebirth. If this is not realized in the inner world it will be enacted in the outer.
”Creativity… expresses itself in the ambivalent experience of rebirth through death (or) in sado-masochistic fantasies.” Erich Neumann.
The process of self-realization involves some painful processes over and above the unearthing of childhood trauma because it involves an end to the notion that we are masters of our own houses. This tends to lead either to a positive inflation in which ego identifies with the Self and becomes cruel, inconsiderate and puffed up with power, or a negative inflation in which we feel lower than a worm and deserving of nothing.
Its easier to act this out in our relationships than it is to contain the violent forces that can swing us back and forth between such extremes.
The alchemical tradition, which offers us a metaphor for the process of individuation, is full of grisly symbolism. The ‘mortificatio’ and ‘putrefacto’ are stages of the journey in which the old sense of identity dies and rots as a result of the encounter with the Self. These ‘torments’ are described as…
”cutting up the limbs, dividing them into smaller and smaller pieces and mortifying the parts.” Rosarium.
This painful process is amplified in Solomon’s ‘Song of Songs’, in which the difficult encounter between bride and bridegroom represent the clash of opposites often described between ego and Self.
”The coniunctio is both desired and dreaded. From a distance it is the source of all yearning, but knocking at our door it is an object of terror.” E. Edinger.
In Solomon’s Song the bridegroom is wounded..
”You ravish my heart with a single one of your glances…”
This acknowledgement between self and ego….
”has a wounding or violating effect.” Edinger.
In Christian iconography this is represented by Jesus on the cross.
‘thou didst wound my heart with one of thine eyes when, hanging upon the cross, I was wounded for love of thee that I might make thee my bride.” ibid
In the Bahavad Gita, Arjuna asks to see Krishna’s true form and quickly regrets it.
”when I see you touching the sky, blazing with many colours, with mouths open wide, with large fiery eyes, my heart trembles in fear and I find neither courage nor peace. Devouring all the worlds on every side, you lick your lips. I implore you, as a lover to the beloved, show me a gentler form.”
The wish for mother confounded by the need to separate from her and the feeling of being torn apart that this can constitute in early life, is a motif that can attend spiritual awakening in later years. They share the common experience of an encounter with Other.
A favorite delusion is that one’s own destiny is simply something to yearn for. But somehow circumstances entangle from the true path… from where you are supposed to be.. forgetting that the path we seek is the one we are on and for good reason. The creatures that used to hide in the closet and under the bed along with all those that come in through the cracks from Elsewhere along the way, have taken up lodging in your outer world and become life’s spiky situations instead.