Chapter XXI · ALGOLAGNIA (SADISM AND MASOCHISM)

“We must continually keep before our minds the fact that in no other department of life so much as in the sexual life do we find side by side, and closely associated each with the other, the noblest and the basest, the superhuman and the subhuman, because the finest and the deepest roots of our spiritual and bodily existence spring, for the most part, from this subsoil; and we must remember that man would not be able to sink so deep, far beneath the level of animality, if he had not first raised himself by his own powers, in conflict with Nature and with himself, through an immeasurable height of civilization.”—Albert Eulenburg.