We thus see that there are here two separate groups of feelings: one, in
the masculine line, which delights in displaying force and often inflicts
pain or the simulacrum of pain; the other, in the feminine line, which
delights in submitting to that force, and even finds pleasure in a slight
amount of pain, or the idea of pain, when associated with the experiences
of love. We see, also, that these two groups of feelings are
complementary. Within the limits consistent with normal and healthy life, what men are impelled to give women love to receive. So that we need not unduly deprecate the "cruelty" of men within these limits, nor unduly commiserate the women who are subjected to it.
Such a conclusion, however, as we have also seen, only holds good within
those normal limits which an attempt has here been made to determine. The
phenomena we have been considering are strictly normal phenomena, having
their basis in the conditions of tumescence and detumescence in animal and
primitive human courtship. At one point, however, when discussing the
phenomena of the love-bite, I referred to the facts which indicate how
this purely normal manifestation yet insensibly passes over into the
region of the morbid. It is an instance that enables us to realize how
even the most terrible and repugnant sexual perversions are still
demonstrably linked on to phenomena that are fundamentally normal. The
love-bite may be said to give us the key to that perverse impulse which
has been commonly called sadism.
There is some difference of opinion as to how "sadism" may be best
defined. Perhaps the simplest and most usual definition is that of
Krafft-Ebing, as sexual emotion associated with the wish to inflict pain
and use violence, or, as he elsewhere expresses it, "the impulse to cruel
and violent treatment of the opposite sex, and the coloring of the idea of
such acts with lustful feeling."[83] A more complete definition is that of
Moll, who describes sadism as a condition in which "the sexual impulse
consists in the tendency to strike, ill-use, and humiliate the beloved
person."[84] This definition has the advantage of bringing in the element
of moral pain. A further extension is made in Fere's definition as "the
need of association of violence and cruelty with sexual enjoyment, such
violence or cruelty not being necessarily exerted by the person himself
who seeks sexual pleasure in this association."[85] Garnier's definition, while comprising all these points, further allows for the fact that a certain degree of sadism may be regarded as normal. "Pathological sadism," he states, "is an impulsive and obsessing sexual perversion characterized by a close connection between suffering inflicted or mentally represented and the sexual orgasm, without this necessary and sufficing condition frigidity usually remaining absolute."[86] It must be added that these definitions are very incomplete if by "sadism" we are to understand the special sexual perversions which are displayed in De Sade's novels. Iwan Bloch ("Eugen Duehren"), in the course of his book on De Sade, has attempted a definition strictly on this basis, and, as will be seen, it is necessary to make it very elaborate: "A connection, whether intentionally sought or offered by chance, of sexual excitement and sexual enjoyment with the real or only symbolic (ideal, illusionary) appearance of frightful and shocking events, destructive occurrences and practices, which threaten or destroy the life, health, and property of man and other living creatures, and threaten and interrupt the continuity of inanimate objects, whereby the person who from such occurrences obtains sexual enjoyment may either himself be the direct cause, or cause them to take place by means of other persons, or merely be the spectator, or, finally, be, voluntarily or involuntarily, the object against which these processes are directed."[87] This definition of sadism as found in De Sade's works is thus, more especially by its final clause, a very much wider conception than the usual definition.