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Although the work of Erich Fromm is not usually associated with feminist theory, his ideas overall are more consonant with contemporary notions of gender than usually recognized. This paper identifies three aspects of Fromm's thought worth feminist revisiting. The first relates to Fromm's gender-less use of sadomasochism to describe relationships based on dominance and subordination; this framework can be applied to sexist dynamics, though not limited to this context. Second, Fromm's vision of love as presented in The Art of Loving can be seen as kindred with Simone de Beauvoir's critique of romantic love and its flaws. Third, and relatedly, Fromm's concerns about the need for recognition as well as autonomy are compatible with Jessica Benjamin's notion of mutual recognition as developed in her book The Bonds of Love. All told, Frommian and feminist thought appear to be more connected than antagonistic.

This article reviewed the concept of masochism by using a mixed-method approach to analyze 23 publications from 1924 to 2012 by authors from different psychoanalytic schools. Qualitative analysis showed that most authors emphasized painful early attachments, early injury of self-representation, identification with an abusing parent, and narcissistic injury as core experiences in the early childhood of patients with masochism. The main psychological function of masochism was described as a way of avoiding uncontrollable suffering by willingly undertaking other, milder, more controllable suffering. Quantitative analyses using standardized measures of conflicts, defenses, and motives revealed that most authors described early, global psychodynamic conflicts, developmentally early motives, and both action-level and neurotic defenses in masochism. Correlation analyses showed that although the main ideas in the concept of masochism remained stable over time, emphasis on certain aspects changed. The findings provide a conceptual overview of masochism and hypotheses for further clinical studies.

The sadomasochistic marriage is thought to be very resistant to change because of the object relations of each member of a couple as well as the sadomasochistic dynamics within the couple. However, the picture may be even more complex because there are times when a psychoanalytic therapist may mistakenly believe he or she is treating a sadomasochistic couple when the couple actually is functioning in a paranoid-masochistic relationship. The present paper reexamines the sadomasochistic marriage by revisiting the work of Nydes, who formulated the concept of paranoid-masochism in individuals and contrasted it to the more commonly understood sadomasochist dynamic. This paper applies his concepts to couples: Just as we understand some couples to be sadomasochistic, other couples may have paranoid-masochistic dynamics, which may require a somewhat different kind of understanding and technical approach than the dynamics of a sadomasochistic couple at the same level of object relations. This may be the reason why some marriages, misdiagnosed as sadomasochistic, are even more difficult to treat than others, because they might be more accurately treated as paranoid-masochistic.

Vampires are often portrayed as seductive. It is difficult to separate this association from the sadistic nature of the figure--a connection that is dependent upon a potential masochism within the victim. Post-Freudian contributions on sadism, masochism, and sexuality have emphasized the role of traumatic factors in influencing the development of sadomasochistic urges. However, the popularity of the vampire figure evidences a role for Freud's notion of an inherent primary masochism. This erotic impulse is primitive in nature and seemingly nonoedipal. Vampire dramatizations are a convenient location for the playing out of these repressed tensions.

An overview of the life and work of Theodor Reik is presented. Because of the confluence of various personal qualities and circumstantial factors, Reik's contributions to twentieth-century psychoanalysis were significant, varied, and controversial. His major contributions include the following: (1) He demonstrated the critical importance of unconscious guilt and masochism in human affairs, on an individual basis as well as man's social institutions. In effect, all neuroses have underlying unconscious guilt and punishment issues. (2) He emphasized that the mission of the analyst is to create an intimate clinical relationship with the patient by utilizing his or her (the analyst's) unconscious in concert with the unconscious of the patient. (3) In establishing the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in 1948, Reik became the father of nonmedical psychoanalytic training in America. (4) Over a thirty-year period after his arrival in New York City in 1938, Reik published over twenty books on psychoanalysis, Reikian style. The most read and influential was Listening With the Third Ear (1948). As a result, Reik became America's primary educator of psychoanalysis.

A set of characteristic symptoms allow for the relatively straightforward diagnosis of eating disorders. Simultaneously and paradoxically, un­ derlying the eating disorders are a wide variety of personality organiza­ tions/disorders, stretching from the neurotic to the borderline and narcissistic, and even to conditions approaching psychosis. This paper will argue that the inherent commonalities can be ascribed to patho­ logical organizations of a similar nature and quality, operational across the spectrum of eating disorders and functioning in a particular, sado­ masochistic way. The typical forms that eating disorders take are based on the specific ways that food and the body are used, that is, symptom manifestation. These distinctive symptom manifestations appear to be related to Steiner’s (1982, 1993) notion of a psychic retreat. Patho­ logical organizations and psychic retreats are latent until called upon either sporadically or continuously. When activated, these defensive structures operate like a complex psychic skeleton around which the unique psychodynamics of each patient become rearranged and there­ by transformed. Many authors have acknowledged the presence of certain com­ mon features manifested in all eating disorders while simultane­ ously and paradoxically documenting a broad range of under­ lying pathology, stretching across all variation of personality organization and/or disorder from the neurotic to the borderline and narcissistic, and even to conditions approaching psychosis (Shipton, 2004; Sours, 1969; Wilson, 1983). The question of how

Even an originally revolutionary movement like psychoanalysis can become conservative and can take refuge, at last, in reactionary acquiescence. Many revolutionary minds, fighters of yesterday, are tired and now rest their cause on dogmas and preconceived ideas. The progress of science does not tolerate such refuge. The shape of psychoanalysis around the year 2000 of our era will be very different from the concept of the New York Psychoanalytical Society of 1945. No prophetic gift is needed to predict that it will be much more occupied with the total human personality than with the sexual components. The picture of psychoanalysis in the year 2000 will, I am sure, be nearer to that which neo-psychoanalysis sketches then to that of libido theory. It will be recognized then that the crude sex-drive cannot have the power attributed to it by Freud and that early mixtures of sexual and non-sexual urges are clearly to be observed in those very phenomena which impress us as "purely" sexual." (Reik, 1945).

Ever since its release in 1973, Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter has been subject to mixed reviews, including its dismissal as “pornographic” for its sexual explicitness, and as “amoral” for “romanticizing” the Holocaust. Shane Dallman (2005), recalling such criticisms, concludes the opposite: “Disturbing? Unquestionably. Exploitation? As the term is accepted, no. This is not a Nazi film. Neither is it a sex film, a gore film, or a thrill show of any kind. This is a challenge . . . and a warning . . . to anyone who would dare explore the darkest realms of the human mind.” (pp. 2–3). Indeed, in the present author’s admittedly subjective opinion, the film sustains such a message with cinematic interest and artistic coherence three decades after its release. Its holding power appears to stem neither from its controversial eroticism nor from its unusual approach to Holocaust subject matter. Rather, the film endures because, while on one level it draws the viewer into a traditional cinematic narrative about two souls enmeshed in each other’s lives and caught up in intrigue, it is also a film of social and artistic inquiry. It makes one think about troubling matters, such as whether a brutal sadist is capable of shame, guilt, and love and whether sex can ever be divorced from the subjugation of one person by another (or whether, more subtly, it involves collaboration for mutual surrender and the emergence of a felt sense of intimacy and consequent pleasure). The film also indirectly questions whether normative sexuality can be so readily distinguished from traumatic compulsion.

Independent of scientific, philosophical, clinical, and moral convictions, or whether these convictions imply optimism or pessimism about the human condition, Freud’s (1920) radical thesis of a death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle merits more study and consideration than it seems to have recently received by psychoanalysts. Most North American psychoanalytic authors are not only highly critical of, but also reject Freud’s speculative assumption of a death drive. With formidable and widespread arguments against it (Bibring, 1943; Brenner, 1971; Fenichel, 1945; Fromm, 1973; Holt, 1965; Schur, 1960, 1972; Stephansky, 1977), the death drive seems to have been killed, and long ago laid to rest, by North American psychoanalytic authors. Even the concept of an aggressive drive with clinical or developmental implications has been eschewed by many psychoanalysts, who—consistent with Fairbain’s (1952) and Kohut’s (1977) formulations— view aggression, and even higher level functions of defense, as secondary to externally derived frustration and/or trauma. The death drive has been dismissed on several grounds. The most consistent arguments against the death drive have been organized by three themes: (1) Faced with the horrors of World War I, the threat to his sons who were in military service, his

My understanding and treatment of patients with severe masochistic features has evolved and changed radically over the last fifteen years. My work with John and his subsequent life led me to search for new techniques and eventually to the discovery of a different way of understanding and treating these patients. I analyzed John in accord with the classical Freudian formulation of masochism. The paternal transference was central and-while a maternal transference and work with the residues of his experience with his mother were present and partially analyzed-the real power of the inner mother was not touched. It was only when I saw him years later in a near-moribund state that I realized the centrality of what we had not analyzed: the attachment to a punishing inner mother. This led me to conceptualize masochism in a new way. Of central importance in the formation of severe masochism is the relationship between an indifferent, possessive, or rejecting mother and a helpless child in the earliest years, before object constancy. This is a time when the child is unable to differentiate between self and mother. What results is a preverbal conviction that they are ungrateful or "bad" if they think, feel, or behave differently than the mother. This leads to a powerful and rigid attachment to this early mother, internalized as a punishing inner mother. This is the precursor of masochism, not a regression from the Oedipus complex. The child will tolerate physical and mental suffering to remain attached to the needed-even though pain inducing-mother. If the child is not attached, he feels helpless and fears survival. This attachment and fear is internalized and becomes unconscious as development proceeds. Eventually, what is observed in adult patients is a person who is sensitive to others, but unable to be sensitive to him/herself. Awareness of the importance and power of the attachment to the punishing inner mother enables the analyst to hear and perceive masochistic material with a shifted focus. This shifted focus naturally leads to different psychoanalytic treatment techniques throughout the analytic process. Two other cases of masochism are used to illustrate the techniques and course of their analytic processes with this "inner mother" focus. The psychoanalytic understanding of many forms of disturbance has shifted from the oedipal period to the early years in recent years. There is also a corresponding emphasis on the actual experiences with early figures, most prominently the mother. The particular dynamics I have described is part of this general trend.

The narcissist and borderline personality types complement one another's defensive style providing needed defensive externalization of disavowed and split-off feelings. One is exploitative, grandiose, and dominant, forever seeking admiration and exhibiting an aggrandized self; the other experiences humiliation, neediness, helplessness, and terror of aloneness. They form a powerful complementary dyad wherein each identifies with disavowed emotional experiences displayed in the other. They can coexist for lengths of time, defensively discharging unwanted feelings. In the first case presented above, the transference was split initially, with the masoborderline patient being victimized and humiliated by her sadonarcissistic lover. In the second case, a male sadonarcissist enacted disavowed feelings through relationships with masoborderline women. In both cases, defensive enactment was fed by a complementary, intense, and symbiotic relationship. Complementary dynamics can be subtle and difficult to analyze. They involve defensive identification that draws on projection, enactment, and externalization--all difficult defenses to analyze. Enactment rather than remembering is inimical to the development of insight into transference and genetic connections and must be worked through for the analysis to progress. More than the usual analytic patience and resolve is needed to work through the difficult entrapments caused by these dynamics.

In this paper, we have described a type of resistance that has attracted increasing psychoanalytic attention in recent years. Patients exposed to intense negativity during early life may develop an addiction to negative experience as adolescents and adults, and this may constitute a central organizing feature of their personality. In almost all patients, however, some moments of negativity may be observed. We have traced the developmental origins of an attachment to negativity, drawing especially on psychoanalytic investigations of preoedipal pathology. Manifestations and derivatives of early negativity include anhedonia, attachment to physical pain, fear of success, masochism, deprivation of self and others, and negative voyeurism. In discussing the dynamic functions of negativity, we place particular emphasis on two motives: the patient's desires for revenge against early objects that have been a source of deprivation and frustration; and the defensive function of negativity in helping to express as well as ward off dangerous wishes to merge with the object. Deviant forms of autoerotism are likely to be used by these patients to deal with the reactivation of early experiences of neglect and rejection. When negativity is used as a defense or method of relating to others it can lead to a severe disruption of the psychotherapeutic relationship. We have reviewed suggestions for the management of extreme negativity in treatment. Resolution of the therapist's countertransference reactions, especially induced feelings of frustration, rage, and helplessness, is crucial. Emphasis also has been placed on the patient's desires for revenge against self and object, and the manner in which these may be understood and eventually resolved. Only when patient and therapist begin to investigate the adaptive functions of extreme negativity can this pathological symptom be resolved and the patient's awareness of self and sense of autonomy be enhanced.

This paper has attempted to discover if the two analyses of Mr. Z by Kohut do in fact substantiate the clinical efficacy of his theoretical model. A brief overview was presented, as were critical assessments. The major point was developed, that a creative working-through of a complementary countertransference was largely responsible for the success of a second analysis after a first phase was seriously undercut by interfering material which rigidified the therapist's interpretation. It was concluded by noting how Kohut's need to overcome the countertransference played a vital role in catalyzing the evolution of his new theory.