Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in WomenEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
In attaining this view of our subject we have learned that any impulse of
true cruelty is almost outside the field altogether. The mistake was
indeed obvious and inevitable. Let us suppose that every musical
instrument is sensitive and that every musical performance involves the
infliction of pain on the instrument. It would then be very difficult
indeed to realize that the pleasure of music lies by no means in the
infliction of pain. We should certainly find would-be scientific and
analytical people ready to declare that the pleasure of music is the
pleasure of giving pain, and that the emotional effects of music are due
to the pain thus inflicted. In algolagnia, as in music, it is not cruelty
that is sought; it is the joy of being plunged among the waves of that
great primitive ocean of emotions which underlies the variegated world of
our everyday lives, and pain--a pain which, as we have seen, is often
deprived so far as possible of cruelty, though sometimes by very thin and
feeble devices--is merely the channel by which that ocean is reached.
If we try to carry our inquiry beyond the point we have been content to
reach, and ask ourselves why this emotional intoxication exerts so
irresistible a fascination, we might find a final reply in the explanation
of Nietzsche--who regarded this kind of intoxication as of great
significance both in life and in art--that it gives us the consciousness
of energy and the satisfaction of our craving for power.[154] To carry the
inquiry to this point would be, however, to take it into a somewhat
speculative and metaphysical region, and we have perhaps done well not to
attempt to analyze further the joy of emotional expansion. We must be
content to regard the profound satisfaction of emotion as due to a
widespread motor excitement, the elements of which we cannot yet
completely analyze.[155]
It is because the joy of emotional intoxication is the end really sought
that we have to regard the supposed opposition between "sadism" and
"masochism" as unimportant and indeed misleading. The emotional value of
pain is equally great whether the pain is inflicted, suffered, witnessed,
or merely exists as a mental imagination, and there is no reason why it
should not coexist in all these forms in the same person, as, in fact, we
frequently find it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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