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.

    53/470 (page 29)
    psychic life: hate and love; or, better expressed, the life impulse and the death impulse. The life impulse serves the preserva- tion of the ego; the death impulse is directed outwardly and sets itself against the other and, only by total suppression of the life impulse, against one's own ego. In my book Die Traiime der Dichter [The Dreams of Artists], I described two offshoots of these impulses, the creative impulse and the de- structive impulse. Hatred is not the expression merely of the life instinct. It represents also the death impulse. I hate you because you threaten my ego. Love as the representative of the life impulse strives to neutralize hate. But the iron law of self-preservation compels us to hate where we love, if the ego falls into the danger of losing its independence and of ex- periencing pain instead of pleasure. Our need to hate is just as great as our need to love. As there is no one that can live without love, so there is also no being who can live without hate. An individual can appar- ently lose his ability to love as well as his ability to hate; then we have a parapathy. Analysis in such cases is able regularly to demonstrate that the affects in the unconscious are fixed upon an object, and the censorship of the entire consciousness prevents these affects from forcing their way into the light of consciousness. One who loves finds it most difficult to accept the fact that hate is the negative expression of love. He makes use of all sorts of devices to conceal this fact from himself. He ration- alizes his hate through jealousy. Although no ground for jealousy exists, it is so hypothetically constructed that it gives opportunity in the fantasies that ensue to discharge the hatred. The scapegoat of the ancient Jews is a beautiful symbol for the projection of the feelings of guilt and hatred upon an inno- cent object. We find in analysis innumerable scapegoats des- tined to serve as objects of hate and to conceal the hatred toward the real object. It is well known that a married man displaces the hatred toward his wife upon her family and especially upon his mother-in-law. (A familiar Slavic proverb says, He who loves his wife, loves his mother-in-law, too.) Sometimes a neighbor woman, a domestic servant, a dog, is selected as the substitute object. These objects have some