Volume 1

Sadism and masochism : the psychology of hatred and cruelty / by Wilhelm Stekel, M.D. Authorized English version by Louise Brink.

  • Wilhelm Stekel
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Sadism and masochism : the psychology of hatred and cruelty / by Wilhelm Stekel, M.D. Authorized English version by Louise Brink. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    theologians, travelers). Among them frequently intelligent, porio- manic, enterprising, but on the other hand melancholy, idealistic, and yet irascible, self-willed, and somewhat despotic natures. Family tree is complete since the year 1529. It is related in the chronicle that N., according to the record the oldest authenticated ancestor, was cast out from the high council of the city St. B., of which he was a member, and lost his title of nobility, because he raged violently against the gospel. This apparently has to do with the adoption on the part of the Swabian free cities of the Reformation, against which this ancestor, evidently a rather zealous Catholic, had protested as it seems pretty forcefully. Shortly after this—perhaps about the middle of the sixteenth cen- tury, the religious peace of Augsburg, 1555, cujus regio, ejus religio [whosoever reigns, his religion]—the family seem to have gone over to Protestantism and then later manifestly become rather traditionally evangelical. Tendency to psychic explosiveness or strange taciturnity in liv- ing members of other branches of the family sporadically ascer- tainable—artistic and on the other hand again inhibited, melan- cholic natures—late erotism, striking choice of women, other psychic peculiarities. My paternal grandfather, an energetic man, probably predomi- nantly cyclothymic, with a sort of Lloyd George physiognomy, lively nature, married in 1848—whether from erotic inclination or more from need of financial foundation for a new undertaking cannot be determined—but at the age of forty a woman of twenty- seven originally of a Bohemian family on her father's side, who brought to the family a rather unfavorable constitution from the racial-hygienic point of view. Physical characteristics of this woman: large, compact, oval, Slavic form of skull—psychic traits according to her picture and tradition: a domineering nature and yet one withdrawn from life, dissatisfied, ill-humored—apparently strongly schizothymic; she presumably brought into the family the neuro-organic weak constitution, which was handed on especially to my father as the youngest of seven children of the paternal grandparents mentioned, and in part also to me. b. My father, as the last child of a man fifty-seven years old and a woman forty-four, a marked neurasthenic, and hypochon- driac, syphilophobe, in his youth probably an erotically shy indi- vidual, has had no sexual relations either before or outside of mar- riage and, according to what my mother says, soon ceased having regular marital intercourse because of fears for his health, which