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, 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 François 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.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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