In normal individuals the idea of love is inseparably associated with tenderness, caressing gestures, words or glances, readiness on the part of either mate to go to extremes in order to enhance the loved one's enjoyment of the amorous relationship, or to protect him against all dangers or suffering. In normal individuals, love and suffering are antithetic terms, love meaning joy and pleasure, (sexual and egotistical), suffering being only conceivable when the craving for love is ungratified, when the lonely lovers are parted by life, when one of them has been robbed by death of his mate, etc.
Algolagnists. There are abnormal human beings, however, known technically as algolagnists (from algos, pain, and lagneia, enjoyment), who cannot imagine or enjoy love when it is entirely dissociated from some form of suffering.
The active algolagnists must inflict some pain,[Pg 189] physical or mental, upon their mate in order to enjoy the pleasures of love to their full extent. The passive algolagnists only attain the highest degree of amorous satisfaction when they are submitted by their mate to painful or humiliating treatment.
Active algolagnists are known more commonly as "sadists," an expression created by Moreau de Tours. Krafft-Ebing, the most famous writer on sexual perversions coined for passive algolagnists the expression "masochists."
The word sadist is derived from the name of Marquis de Sade, a French pervert of the eighteenth century, whose life and writings well illustrate the form of love which is constantly associated with acts of cruelty.
Donatien Alphonse Fran?ois de Sade was born in Paris, June 2 1740, the offspring of an aristocratic family of Provence. Among his ancestors was the Laura of Petrarca's sonnets.
At fourteen, he joined a cavalry regiment. He went thru the Seven Years War during which he witnessed the most ruthless atrocities. On his return, at the age of twenty-seven, he married, but soon after his marriage was arrested for some deed of cruelty committed in a house of prostitution.
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His father's death left him heir to an important government position but his life of excesses gave him little time to attend to his duties.
At twenty-eight, he attracted much attention by a scandal in which he played a prominent part. He lured a shopkeeper's wife, Rose Keller to a house in the suburbs of the French capital where he used to hold revels.
Threatening the woman with a pistol, he bound her hands and feet and whipped her to the blood.
The next morning, Rose Keller managed to free herself, jumped out of the window and summoned help. De Sade was arrested but the affair was soon hushed up by powerful friends at the court of Louis the Fifteenth.
That incident is characteristic of sadism in love's relations. His victim's sufferings supplied De Sade with the artificial stimulation which normal desire would produce in a normal man.
Soon after this, De Sade eloped to Italy with his wife's sister.
On his way to Italy, he stopped in Marseille and organized an orgy in the course of which he gorged his guests with candy containing some poisonous aphrodisiac drug. Two of them died.
This time, a court rendered a death sentence[Pg 191] against the murderous pervert, who eluded the police for a time and was finally confined in the fortress of Vincennes for thirteen years.
It was said at the time that a woman had been found in a house where he indulged in all sorts of debauches, unconscious and bleeding from a hundred scalpel wounds which had severed many veins.
De Sade devoted his enforced leisure to writing. His published works fill up ten volumes. They contain a description of the most atrocious sexual cruelties. The author makes a childish attempt at establishing a "satanic" morality based on the fact that "virtue is always punished by the world and vice always rewarded." His atheism is no more than a satanic ritual.
De Sade's literary output, which is devoid of any artistic merit and is only of interest to the student of abnormal psychology, bears the stamp of hopeless intellectual inferiority trying to justify itself by representing the entire world as a combination of a brothel and a torture chamber and mankind as a herd of blood-thirsty and sex-crazed lunatics. A sinister autobiography and wish fulfilment.
The revolutionists of 1789 who opened the doors of all jails and insane asylums gave De Sade his freedom on July 14. He sided politically with his[Pg 192] deliverers but after a while, became suspicious to them and again spent one year in prison (1793-1794).
What Bonaparte Thought of Him. De Sade, who had been very liberal in presenting free copies of his obscene novels to men prominent in the days of the Revolution and the Terror, made the mistake of sending a set of his works to Bonaparte.
The Corsican caused the entire edition to be suppressed and diagnosed the author very accurately as a murderous pervert, unfit to be at large. De Sade was committed to an insane asylum where he remained until his death on December 2, 1814.
Sadism is a morbid phenomenon which remained mysterious until recently, when the experimental work of physiologists like Cannon, Sherrington and others, revealed to us the close connection existing between mental states, muscular tensions and the secretions of ductless glands of the body.
Adler's "individual psychology" also has thrown much light upon many morbid actions which are simply attempts at compensation for a feeling of inferiority. The neurotic, briefly speaking, feels inferior, that is, afraid of some imaginary danger.[Pg 193] He casts about for something which can be done quickly, simply, with the least effort, and which will restore his peace and safety by filling him, were it only temporarily, with a sense of actual or imaginary superiority.
Glandular Drunkenness. Wulffen suggests an interpretation of sadism which is ingenious but unconvincing. He considers every act of violence as provoked by the faulty functioning of some glands.
He compares the effect of the gonadal hormones (one of the secretions of the sex glands issuing from the interstitial cells) with that of alcohol. Alcohol destroys the inhibitions and allows unconscious cravings of an inacceptable sort to express themselves thru overt acts.
The drunken man loses all shame and all fear, becomes boisterous and, at times, murderous. Likewise, Wulffen says, oversecretion of the gonadal hormones creates a sort of sexual drunkenness in the course of which the individual is forced into violent or cruel behavior.
This would be acceptable if all the sadists were strong healthy specimens of manhood and womanhood. Most of them, on the contrary, show plainly signs of glandular insufficiency.
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Wulffen's thesis is not confirmed as some writers assume by a study of the mating habits of many animals. Cocks during the act of mating peck cruelly the back of the hen's head. Tomcats bite the............