The man whom Krafft-Ebing selected as the typical masochist, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, was born in Lemberg, January 27, 1836. He was extremely frail in infancy and childhood. He compensated for his physical inferiority thru unusual mental activity, for at the age of nineteen he won his degree of doctor of law. At twenty he was appointed instructor in German history at an university. At the age of twenty-five he was the author of several books of history. He then turned to fiction, first of the historical and then of the purely psychological type.
A morbid tendency was observable in his very first books, a tendency which became more and more marked and which led him to write almost exclusively descriptions of perverse love entanglements.
He showed a decided preference for delineating[Pg 201] cruel, mannish types of women and incredibly weak types of men.
As in the case of Marquis de Sade, we observe here a strange parallelism between the man's writings and his own biography.
Sacher-Masoch's first love was a woman much older than himself, Anna von Kattowitz, who for four years humiliated, insulted and victimised him in every possible way, finally running away with a Russian adventurer.
Then he met Princess Bogdanoff for whom he abandoned temporarily his professional and literary ambitions. She took him to Italy where he was compelled to serve her as a secretary and valet. He enjoyed the relationship, but the princess soon tired of him.
His next liaison was with Baroness Fanny Pistor, with whom he had his picture taken once in the following position: she seated on a sofa and clad in furs, he kneeling at her feet on the floor.
Then came Baroness Reizenstein, whom he could not love very long for she refused to satisfy his morbid craving for physical torture and humiliating treatment and, besides, was homosexual.
Then he became engaged to a young artist, Miss Bauerfeld, of Graz.
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Soon after, however, he met an ugly, mannish hysterical person, Vanda Dunayef, who gratified better his perverse leanings and compelled him to break his engagement. A child was born of their union and in 1873 they were married. They traveled from town to town, apparently unable to find peace anywhere, and she finally left him to elope with a reporter from the Paris Figaro.
Sacher-Masoch secured a divorce and married again, this time a motherly type of woman, Hulda Meister, retired with her to the small village of Lindheim and died there on March 9, 1895.
A few incidents of his life describe well his perversion.
Love of the Whip. Once, according to Havelock Ellis, in the course of an innocent romp in which the whole household took part, Sacher-Masoch asked his wife to whip him. She refused. Then he suggested the maid should do it.
His wife did not take this seriously, but he had the servant whip him to his full enjoyment. When his wife urged that it would not be possible to keep the maid after this, Sacher-Masoch agreed and she was discharged.
He constantly found pleasure in placing his wife[Pg 203] in awkward or compromising circumstances, a pleasure she was too normal to share.
This led to much domestic unhappiness. Against her wish he persuaded her to whip him with whips to which nails were attached. This he claimed was a literary stimulus.
Dr. Eulenburg tells of a young woman with whom Sacher-Masoch corresponded for a while and to whom he wrote that "his greatest joy would be to be whipped by a woman." Later on, Sacher-Masoch met her in Vienna and asked her to don a fur coat and to whip him. She however, pretended to treat the matter as a joke, and dismissed him.
His numerous books of fiction present over and over again the same theme: the domineering woman, "clad in furs," who tortures a weak helpless man.
We behold in Sacher-Masoch a clear case of physical weakness and glandular insufficiency. His endocrines, in particular his adrenals and gonads, required the actual stimulation of pain (whipping) before they could react properly to a sexual stimulus.
It is a curious coincidence that among all forms[Pg 204] of stimulation used to accelerate the gait of beasts of burden or draft horses, the whip is the most commonly used the world over and that, on the other hand, perverts of the masochist type have, the world over and at every age of history, more frequently resorted to the whip to torture themselves than to any other means of physical punishment.
The Masochist is Like a Weak or Tired Horse. Why does whipping make a horse go faster? Not merely on account of the fear or pain which the beast experiences, but because that fear and pain MAKE HIM STRONGER.
The adrenalin liberated by the fear-and-pain-producting stimulus stiffens every muscle in his body and his strength is doubled.
This is why frightened animals or insane people in a panic can perform feats of strength of which they would be absolutely incapable in a normal state.
Masochism is much more, however, than an organic attempt at compensating for glandular inferiority and acquiring in a morbid way increased sexual potency. It is a neurotic expedient whereby an inferior man or woman compensates for his or her weakness thru more weakness.
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By belittling themselves, by disparaging their own ability, masochist lovers can take advantage of their mate, let him bear all responsibilities.
Shoe Fetishism. We understand from that point of view the meaning of the shoe fetishism which Krafft-Ebing has noticed in male masochists. In fact Hirschfeld states that every male shoe fetish is a masochist.
To the masochist, the shoe, especially the high buttoned shoe, is symbolical of woman's power, of her ruthless cruelty. He sees himself trod on by that shoe, he imagines that shoe pressing on his neck, pinning his head to the ground.
Curiously enough, long gloves seem to arouse the same ideas in the mind of the male masochist. Both shoes and gloves are found in the dreams or visions of neurotics, symbolizing the female organs.
A masochist wrote once: "The gloved hand of a woman, altho like her foot, smaller and prettier than a man's, can wield the whip powerfully over her slave whose greatest joy consists then in kissing his mistress's shoes while submitting to that punishment."
Craving for Humiliation. The masochist welcomes every form of humiliation and not infre[Pg 206]quently derives great pride from his "patience," "tolerance," "self-sacrifice," "martyrlike resignation" et............