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Journal of Personality Disorders, 1(2). 174-177, 1987
' 1987 The Guilford Press
There are a number of reasons why the new DSM category 301.89, self-defeating personality disorder, is undesirable. It ignores one of Freud's
greatest contributions the repetition compulsion and
uses descriptive
terms that suggest a conscious willfulness in the person. To elaborate, the masochistic person (to use the former description) is not, in this writers
experience, bored; she and it is usually she does not incite rejecting
responses, she elicits them; there is a big difference between these two words
and their meanings. She does not turn down opportunities for pleasure,
but rather, pleasurable occurrences turn sour. The descriptive elaboration
of this category is largely expression of surface manifestations, while they
are largely the outer appearance of deep unconscious forces.
The belief that there is pleasure in masochistic suffering is a longstanding
one, based, perhaps, on Sigmund Freud's concept of the pleasure principle.
In fact, the masochist does not enjoy suffering. If one paraphrases the credo
of Descartes "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am), a statement of what
distinguishes humans, the masochist's credo can be expressed as "I suffer,
therefore I am." This is a constant reenactment of early experience, which has had virtually nothing pleasurable in it.
The notion that masochism is the experience of sexual pleasure-in-pain
had its roots in the work of Krafft-Ebing (1965) and has persisted. Sigmund
Freud (1924), aware that there were inevitably points in the female repro
ductive process that were painful, based his conclusion on a study of men;
he theorized that masochistic men acted as if they were castrated and were
therefore like women, and concluded that masochism must be instinctual in women.
Variations on this concept continued until Karen Homey (1967) pointed
to the contribution of social forces to masochistic behavior in women, and Bieber (1974) was among the first to equate masochism with fear of the power of others.
Returning to the concept of the repetition compulsion, the masochistic
person lives in fear of others (personified significant adults of the past), attempts to respond in ways that were demanded of her/him as a child in
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