From “Psychopathia Sexualis” by Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (pp. 131-134, U.S. edition of 1926 translated by F.J. Rebman):


Masochism. The Association of Passively Endured Cruelty and Violence with Lust.

Masochism is the opposite of sadism. While the later is the desire to cause pain and use force, the former is the wish to suffer pain and be subjected to force.

By masochism I understand a particular 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 a master, humiliated and abused. This idea is coloured by lusting feeling; the masochist lives in fancies, in which he creates situations of this kind and often attempts to realize them. By this perversion his sexual instinct is often made more or less insensible to the normal charms of the opposite sex—incapable of a normal vita sexualis—psychically impotent. But this psychical impotence does not in any way depend upon horror sexus alterius, but upon the fact that the perverse instinct finds an adequate satisfaction differing from the normal—in woman, to be sure, but not in coitus.

But cases also occur in which with the perverse impulse there is still some sensibility to normal stimuli, and intercourse under normal conditions takes place. In other cases the impotence is not purely psychical, but physical, i.e., spinal; for this perversion, like almost all other perversions of the sexual instinct, is developed only on the basis of psychopathic and, for the most part, hereditarily tainted individuality; and as a rule such individuals are given to excesses, particularly masturbation, to which the difficulty of attaining what their fancy creates drives them again and again.

I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly “Masochism,” because the author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the substratum of his writings. I followed thereby the scientific formation of the term “Daltonism,” from Dalton, the discoverer of colour-blindness.

During recent years facts have been advanced which prove that Sacher-Masoch was not only the poet of Masochism, but that he himself was afflicted with this anomaly. Although these proofs were communicated to me without restriction, I refrain from giving them to the public. I refute the accuation that I have coupled the name of a revered author with a perversion of the sexual instinct, which has been made against me by some admirers of the author and by some critics of my book. As a man Sacher-Masoch cannot lose anything in the estimation of his cultured fellow-beings simply because he was afflicted with an anomaly of his sexual feelings. As an author he suffered severe injury so far as the influence and intrinsic merit of his work is concerned, for so long and whenever he eliminated his perversion from his literary efforts he was a gifted writer and as such would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings. In this respect he is a remarkable example of the powerful influence exercised by the vita sexualis—be it in good or evil sense—over the formation and direction of man’s mind.