Note 369 — Chapter IV · (continued 3)

R. von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis, etc., 7te Auflage, p. 89 (the third edition of this book, from which I have made my previous citations, contains nothing on masochism), and Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der Psychopathia sexualis eine medicinisch-psychologische Studie, Zweite umgearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage, Stuttgart, 1891, p. 1 ff. Krafft-Ebing gives this explanation of his word (p. 1 et seq.): ‘By masochism I understand a peculiar perversion of the psychic vita sexualis, consisting in this, that the individual seized with it is dominated in his sexual feeling and thought by the idea that he is wholly and unconditionally subjected to the will of a person of the opposite sex, who treats him imperiously, humiliates and maltreats him.’ The word is formed from the name Sacher-Masoch, because ‘his writings delineate exactly typical pictures of the perverted psychic life of men of this kind’ (Neue Forschungen, etc., p. 37). I do not look upon this designation as a happy one. Krafft-Ebing himself shows that Zola and, long before him, Rousseau (he might have added Balzac in Baron Hulot in Parents pauvres, part i.: La cousine Bette) have embodied this condition quite as clearly as Sacher-Masoch. Hence I prefer the designation ‘passivism,’ proposed by Dimitry Stefanowsky. See Archives de l’Anthropologie criminelle, 1892, p. 294.