e International Journal of

Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92:149169 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2010.00378.x

Between the quills: Schopenhauer and Freud on sadism and masochism

Robert Grimwade
630 First Avenue Apt. 18L, New York, NY 10016, USA rjgrimwade@gmail.com
(Final version accepted 7 July 2010)

It is a matter of common knowledge that Sigmund Freud (18561939) and Arthur Schopenhauer (17881860) shared a common worldview. Everyone familiar with the works of these two thinkers should recognize their general philosophical affinities. Both men were pessimistic about the power of human reason and attributed human behavior to powerful unconscious forces and, as a result, both were deeply skeptical about the future of human society. Drawing from previous literature, this essay compares the philosophical theory of Schopenhauer with the psychoanalytic theory of Freud. We find that, while Schopenhauer and Freud share a common philosophical orientation and diagnosed the same fundamental problems with life in civilization, they proposed some ostensibly similar, yet ultimately very different solutions. Focusing on each thinkers respective notion of sadism and masochism, this paper tries to understand and come to terms with the dimensions of this radical pessimism.
Keywords: history of psychoanalysis, interpretation, metapsychology

Introduction
Everyone familiar with the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (17881860) and Sigmund Freud (18561939) should immediately recognize their philosophical affinity. Many obvious parallels strike even the casual reader. Both thinkers conceived that sexuality played an enormous role in human behavior, far beyond the limited area granted it by their respective contemporaries. Both believed that the vast majority of mental activity proceeds unconsciously and that the role of the conscious mind had been greatly overestimated by the philosophical tradition. Both men understood human behavior as the product of powerful and often conflicting drives. Each thinker held that mental illness involved a disorder of memory. And perhaps most importantly, they shared a pessimistic view of human nature, which required them to confront the complexities of human aggression and the problems of life in civilization. The first section of this essay focuses on the many structural similarities of their general theories and the second attempts to examine their respective theories of human aggression. The problem of sadism and, perhaps most importantly, masochism consistently occupied both thinkers throughout their intellectual careers. These theories allow us to see the underlying reasons for their pessimistic view of human life in society, which is little more than a fraught and tenuous alliance generated by the forced repression and sublimation of our dark essential nature.
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R. Grimwade The large extent to which psycho-analysis coincides with the philosophy of Schopenhauer not only did he assert the dominance of the emotions and the supreme importance of sexuality but he was even aware of the mechanism of repression is not to be traced to my acquaintance with his teaching. I read Schopenhauer very late in my life. (Freud, 1925, pp. 5960)

With any study that compares the thought of two monumental figures, there inevitably arises the question of influence. It is certain that Freud read Schopenhauer as he readily admits to having done so. It is not a matter of if Freud read Schopenhauer, but when. While Freud claims that he read Schopenhauer late in life, many authors, including, notably Young and Brook (1994), have questioned Freuds claim. In this essay, I refrain from any speculation as to whether Freud took his ideas directly from Schopenhauer, as my intention is not to undermine Freuds originality, but to advance our interdisciplinary understanding of sadism, masochism, and human aggression. In my view, even if Freud gained his initial orientation directly from Schopenhauer, Freuds dynamic and novel insights into the human mind and his singlehanded invention of psychoanalytic method go far beyond what Schopenhauer could have ever conceived. Thus I leave the question of Schopenhauers influence on the father of psychoanalysis to the educated reader.

1. Some notable similarities 1.1 The will and the id

As R. K. Gupta (1975) pointed out in her essay, Freud and Schopenhauer: There is a striking similarity between Schopenhauers view of the will and Freuds concept of the id (p. 721). Both Freud and Schopenhauer saw unconscious drives as the real motive force behind all human behavior. Schopenhauer used the German term Wille to represent the dark unconscious striving at the heart of the universe that is indivisible, timeless, irrational, and absolutely amoral. Schopenhauers metaphysics, explicated rather consistently throughout his philosophical works and personal journals, is an Eastern-inspired strain of Kantian idealism. For Schopenhauer the empirical world, of sense perception, is appearance, illusion, the veil of Maya, mere representation. He accepts this, for the most part, as proven by Kants Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) but Schopenhauer, unlike Kant, understood the world of experience as illusory. Like many influential philosophers of his time, Schopenhauer was not content within the epistemological limitations established by Kant. Schopenhauer was convinced that, while Kant was right about the limits of knowledge, he had missed something very important about human experience: that it is embodied.1 Our embodied nature, Schopenhauer claimed, gives us privileged access to the inside of a phenomenon: we know
1

See The World as Will and Representation, I, paras 6, 18 (Schopenhauer, 1818) for a discussion of the body as the immediate object of experience. The extent to which Schopenhauer follows Spinoza on this point is of interest, but unfortunately beyond the purview of this essay. Copyright 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

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what it feels like to be a representation from the inside. The most immediate and direct feeling of our body is desire, a drive, a striving for X, and the various affects that arise from this want or need. This vital impulse, Schopenhauer declares, is what must be behind all the phenomena in nature and, furthermore, all the phenomena in reality. This is what all the forces of the universe must feel like from the inside in, at least, some dull degree. This impulse, the will, is not subject to time and space, in his parlance the principle of individuation, and is therefore singular and indivisible. As Kants thing-in-itself it is absolutely the same in everything that exists and only receives its difference via the subject who brings space and time as a priori conditions of the understanding. Thus will as the thing-in-itself is the singular totality and primal unity of all that exists in representation. Only in representation is there difference and multiplicity. For Schopenhauer, everything in the universe is the representation of one indivisible will. The will-in-itself is free as there is nothing to limit or determine it. The will is a blind striving, a blind impulse of which we are the mere objectification. This, Schopenhauer believed, is confirmed and demonstrated by empirical observations of nature, which reveal that all of nature, including human life, is bellum omnium contra omnes. In nature the will, as the indivisible thing-in-itself, appears whole in each individual who strives with the entire force of the world for its continued existence. Nature as the objectification of will entails that, in modern vernacular, desire comes before the organ: Teeth, gullet, and intestinal canal are objectified hunger; the genitals are objectified sexual impulse [Geschlechtstrieb] (Schopenhauer, 1818, p. 108). Schopenhauer recognizes the objectifications of this will as a continuous line of development from the blind impulse of nature, through plants and animals, all the way to human bodies. Even a river gushes with the same vehemence as animal and human desires because it is the objectification of unconscious impulse, a representation of the world will. The will as will in itself [noumenon] is not subject to the principle of individuation, where it appears as blind striving, yet in its phenomena this will takes on a different character as a will to life [Wille zum Leben]. This will to life manifests itself into two basic drives and a series of lesser drives that are subordinate to these.
The will-to-live manifests itself in reference to the individual as hunger and fear of death; in reference to the species, as sexual impulse and passionate care for the offspring. (Schopenhauer, 1844, pp. 4845)

The will to life2, as a will to will, manifests itself as a multiplicity of drives; the two most basic and important of these are hunger and the sexual drive [Geschlechtstrieb]. (It is important to bear in mind that these are separated in representation alone, as the in-itself they both are the will to life.) Here Schopenhauer moves directly into what shall become the territory of Freudian psychoanalysis.
2 Schopenhauer sometimes called the will to life the drive for self preservation [Trieb zur Selbfterhaltung]; for example, see The World as Will and Representation, II, ch. 45 (Schopenhauer, 1844).

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Freuds id [das Es] (part of the structural model of the psyche) is strikingly similar to Schopenhauers will. The id is a mass of unconscious drives which act according to the pleasure principle to discharge tension. It is a dark and inaccessible part of the mind that strives for expression. The id is responsible for all the basic functions of the mind and contains the drives for sex, hunger, and other basic necessities. It is without a sense of time, completely irrational, and amoral. But Freud does not attribute this dark unconscious striving to the whole universe as Schopenhauer does. Freud, unlike Schopenhauer, is concerned with empirical verifiability not metaphysical speculation. For Freud the drive is a process on the border of psyche and soma, ultimately based upon entirely biological processes. For Freud the drive does not precede the organ, in fact, the organ is the source [Quelle] of the drive. So while Schopenhauer understood all the perceived world as the manifestation of the will, Freud understood the id as issuing from mechanical and chemical processes of the body; thus for Freud the id is not free, it is utterly determined.

1.2 The role of sexuality

The sexual impulse is proved to be the decided and strongest affirmation of life it is his [humankinds] lifes final end and its highest goal. Self-preservation and maintenance are his first aim, and as soon as he has provided for that, he aims at the propagation of the race. (Schopenhauer, 1818, p. 329)

As many authors have noted including Bischler (1939), Wisdom (1945), Proctor-Gregg (1956), Gupta (1975), and Young and Brook (1994) Schopenhauer anticipates Freuds expanded conception of sexuality. Schopenhauer anticipated Freuds early (pre-1923) distinction between sexual drives and self-preservative drives and understood that sexuality underlies most, if not all, human behaviour. He states: It is really the invisible central point of all action and conduct (Schopenhauer, 1844, p. 513). Like Freud, he understood sexuality to be the most powerful of drives:
Sexual desire bears a character very different from that of any other; it is not only the strongest of the desires, but is even of a more powerful kind than all the others are ... it is the desire that constitutes even the very nature of man. In conflict with it, no motive is so strong as to be certain of victory for its sake moreover, animal and man undertake every peril and conflict. (ibid., pp. 5123)

Schopenhauer, further anticipating Freud, understood love as entirely sexual in nature: All amorousness is rooted in the sexual impulse alone (ibid., p. 533). Schopenhauer, however, with his predilection for metaphysics, connected sexuality to the will-of-the-species, which always serves as its guiding metaphysical thrust. Freud also understood sexual desire as the primary stimulus in human life. Since all desire is libidinal in Freuds view, all of life, including psychological development, is spurred on and defined by erotic charge. The salient difference between Freuds and Schopenhauers view of sexuality is the absence of the metaphysical will in Freuds model.
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As we have seen above, Freud, as a scientist, preferred purely biological explanations to metaphysical ones. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer had extended the concept of sexuality, lord of the world (1844, p. 513), further than anyone before him by expounding: It is the ultimate goal of almost all human effort (ibid., p. 533, emphasis mine). Freud himself acknowledged this in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: For it is some time since Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher, showed mankind the extent to which their activities are determined by sexual impulses in the ordinary sense of the word (Freud, 1905, p. 134).3 The concept Eros, a prominent feature of Freuds later works, appears by name in Schopenhauers The World as Will and Representation to describe the will-to-live as sexual impulse (Schopenhauer, 1818, p. 330).4 While Schopenhauer had a conception of Eros, as Young and Brook (1994, pp. 106107) suggest, he had no explicit notion of Thanatos. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud states: We have unwittingly steered our course into the harbour of Schopenhauers philosophy. For him death is the true result and to that extent the purpose of life, while the sexual instinct is the embodiment of the will to live (Freud, 1920, pp. 4950). Although Freud was correct about the sexual instinct being the embodiment of the will-tolife, he was incorrect about death being the purpose of life for Schopenhauer. While Schopenhauer often makes statements such as: Birth and death belong equally to life, and hold the balance as mutual conditions of each other, or, if the expression be preferred, as poles of the whole phenomenon of life which ostensibly accord with Freuds depiction, Schopenhauer did not view death as some final cause (Schopenhauer, 1818, p. 275). The will in itself is entirely indifferent to the death of a single individual. On the level of the individual, this will-to-live is, following Spinoza, primarily a selfpreservative instinct.5 In Schopenhauers view, each individual being naturally strives for life and resists death. Freuds death drive [Todestrieb] is a unique and unprecedented theory in the history of ideas. For Schopenhauer the will always wills itself: it wills life, the expansion and growth of each individual and the species. While Schopenhauer does not account for the death drive proper, he certainly accounts for some of its outward manifestations. Freuds death drive is a multifaceted concept which explains many behaviors; projected inwardly it is masochistic, outwardly it is sadistic: the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power (Freud, 1924, p. 163). For Schopenhauer, in congruence with the early views of Freud, outwardly aggressive and destructive behaviors are the result of the struggle for continued existence. All living things, as manifestations of will, are bound to struggle against anything and everything to the utmost extremity of their power to persevere in being and expand themselves. The collision of these
3 4

As we shall see, Schopenhauers use of sexual impulses was certainly not ordinary.

He attributes the etymology of the word and the concept to Hesiod and Parmenides and provides a beautiful and insightful quote by Pherecydes: Zeus transformed himself into Eros, when he wished to create the world (ibid.).
5

See Spinozas Ethics Book III, pp. 57 (Spinoza, 1677). Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92

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individuated wills inevitably ensues. The fight for space, mates, and other resources necessitate a world full of profound conflicts and eternal strife. For Schopenhauer, the world will is eating itself alive and he is profoundly disturbed by the thought that millions upon millions of creatures are being torn apart incessantly in an eternal cycle of anguish. As Young and Brook (1994) suggest, Schopenhauer did not recognize infantile sexuality, but understood the profound significance of childhood experiences for later life and development:
The experiences and acquaintances of childhood and early youth afterward become the regular standing types and rubrics of all later knowledge and experience, their categories as it were, to which we subsume everything that comes later, although we are not always clearly conscious of so doing. Accordingly, the solid foundation of our view of the world and thus its depth or shallowness are formed in childhood. (Schopenhauer, 1851b, p. 478)

For Schopenhauer it is the absence of the role of the will-to-live of the species (i.e. the sexual impulse) in childhood that allows the intellect to thrive. For Schopenhauer children are little philosophers, thriving intellects not yet dominated by the sexual impulse. Here Schopenhauer stands in direct opposition to Freud. As is well known, Freuds early discovery of infantile sexuality was an entirely original and pivotal part of his theory that he never abandoned.

1.3 The unconscious and the role of the intellect

Schopenhauer and Freud both recognized unconscious processes at the heart of human life. In his early works, Freud recognized the unconscious as a separate psychic system from the conscious system mediated by a preconscious. In The Unconscious Freud describes some features of what he then understood as the system Ucs: The nucleus of the unconscious consists of instinctual representatives which seek to discharge their cathexis (Freud, 1915b, p. 186). The unconscious is characterized by timelessness, disregard for reality, and irrationality. As we have indicated above, Schopenhauers notion of will has similar characteristics: it is atemporal, as, following Kant, time is a form of intuition. It has no regard for phenomena (Schopenhauers equivalent to what Freud is calling reality) because it is the Kantian thing-in-itself. Furthermore, it is inherently irrational since reason is a faculty of the thinking subject that only applies itself in conscious thought.6 In Freuds structural theory the id is timeless, irrational and characterized by a blind striving. Both thinkers understood these amoral and irrational unconscious drives as the motor behind most if not all human behavior. As Young and Brook (1994) note, Schopenhauer understood the intellect as secondary to the will much as Freud understood the relation between the ego and the id. Schopenhauer asserts the master is the will the servant is the intellect (Schopenhauer, 1844, p. 208). And the will shows itself as that original force, against which the intellect can do nothing (ibid., p. 227).
6

Schopenhauer is not always clear on this matter. He considers the will to be an irrational striving, says it has no aims, but often speaks of its aims. Copyright 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

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Freud understood the ego as representing reason and common sense and the id as a bundle of unconscious drives. In The Ego and the Id he provides us with the following analogy:
The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus in relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obligated to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the ids will into action as if it were its own. (Freud, 1923, p. 19)

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud presents consciousness as a protective shield which developed to resist outside stimuli, to protect the deeper layers of the organism (Freud, 1920, p. 18). As is clear from the above quotes, while both theorists give the ego limited powers, Schopenhauer virtually condemns it: Everything primary, and consequently everything genuine, in man works as the forces of nature do, unconsciously (Schopenhauer, 1851a, p. 175). When Schopenhauer begins to advocate a strong ethical position rather than merely stating the facts, he obliges the reader to deny the will-to-live and thereby the role of the intellect shifts into a more commanding position.7 After this turning point a noteworthy similarity emerges. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Civilization and Its Discontents and other works Freud notes that all of civilization is characterized by repression of the id. Throughout his works, Schopenhauer understood the intellect as an organ of the will, but it was rare and advanced intellects that made civilization possible, as these knowing subjects regulate and channel the striving of the will (Schopenhauer, 1818, p. 152).

1.4 Mental illness

Wisdom (1945), Proctor-Gregg (1956), Gupta (1975), and Young and Brook (1994) rightfully notice that Schopenhauers conception of mental illness anticipates many of Freuds early concepts and theories. Schopenhauer proposed that trauma, memory, and repression play a significant role in madness. It is a little known fact that Schopenhauer was a frequent visitor to insane asylums where he would hold long conversations with the inmates, and go back again and again to talk to those that interested him (Magee, 1989, p. 226 n.). As a result of these conversations Schopenhauer discovered the role of repressed memories in madness:
If such a sorrow, such painful knowledge or reflection, is so harrowing that it becomes positively unbearable, and the individual would succumb to it, then nature alarmed in this way seizes on madness as the last means of saving life. The mind, tormented so greatly, destroys as it were the thread of its memory, fills up the gap with fictions, and thus seeks refuge in madness from the mental suffering that
7 The ascetic denial of the will is one of the central tenets of Schopenhauers moral philosophy. Expansion of the intellect by rigorous acetic denial of the will-to-live allows one to escape suffering. For more on this, see Schopenhauers fourth section of The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I (Schopenhauer, 1818) and the corresponding sections in Vol. II (Schopenhauer, 1844).

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R. Grimwade exceeds its strength, just as a limb affected by mortification is cut off and replaced with a wooden one (Schopenhauer, 1818, p. 193)

Compare this with the following passage from Freud and Breuers Preliminary Communication: These memories, unlike other memories of their past lives, are not at the patients disposal. On the contrary, these experiences are completely absent from the patients memory when they are in a normal psychical state, or are only present in a highly summary form (Breuer and Freud, 1893, p. 9). Further, Freud states that these repressed memories correspond to traumas that have not been sufficiently abreacted (ibid., p. 10). In The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence Freud (1894) describes defence as an effort to push away an experience that the conscious mind cannot handle, however, in cases of hysteria (and other neuroses) the memory or its affective trace cannot be eradicated (Freud, 1894, p. 48). Compare Freuds more advanced conception of defense with that of Schopenhauer quoted above. In Studies on Hysteria Freud discovered that he had to to overcome a psychical force in the patients which was opposed to the pathogenic ideas becoming conscious (being remembered) (Breuer and Freud, 1893, p. 268). This force of resistance is a defense. Schopenhauer states that there is resistance on the part of the will to allow what is contrary to it to come under the examination of the intellect (Schopenhauer, 1844, p. 400, emphasis mine). Freud discovered that: The patients ego had been approached by an idea which proved to be incompatible, which provoked on the part of the ego a repelling force of which the purpose was defence against this incompatible idea. This defence was in fact successful. The idea in question was forced out of consciousness and out of memory (Breuer and Freud, 1893, p. 269). This force of repression, or defense, would eventually lead to Freuds discovery of the unconscious. At this early stage in Freuds work, treatment involved bringing these repressed memories into the conscious mind. Compare this with Schopenhauers novel idea: Every new adverse event must be assimilated by the intellect, in other words, must receive a place in the system of truths connected with our will and its interests (Schopenhauer, 1844, p. 400). Allowing these memories into the intellect is often very painful and if this does not occur, then the gaps are filled up with fictions and we have madness (ibid.). While Schopenhauers speculative account is less sophisticated than Freuds technical one, it nevertheless indicates that Schopenhauer understood that the broken thread of memory, repression, and trauma play a significant role in mental illnesses.

2. Sadism and masochism

Now that we have compared some of Schopenhauers major anticipations of Freuds theory, we are able to approach the topic proper: the comparison of Freuds account of sadism and masochism with Schopenhauers. We have seen above that Freuds meta-psychological theory was constantly evolving and expanding. As his ideas matured so did his conception of sadism and masochism. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, wrote the World as Will and
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Representation, Vol. 1 (his major work) in 1818, at the age of 31, and stood by the philosophical views presented in this work until his death in 1860 (McGill, 1931, p. 304). (The second volume published in 1844 was only an expansion and deepening of the views presented in volume one with no significant structural changes.) I shall begin with Freuds initial account of a secondary masochism presented in The Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), Instincts and their vicissitudes (1915a), and A child is being beaten (1919) and then present his later account of a primary sadismmasochism presented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Ego and the Id (1923), The economic problem of masochism (1924), Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). I shall then give an account of Schopenhauers understanding of sadism and masochism while unearthing relevant similarities and differences.

2.1 Freud on sadism and masochism

The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness a desire to subjugate; the biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position. (Freud, 1905, pp. 1567)

Freud initially understood sadism as the manifestation of an overstated aggressive component drive of the sexual drive (as indicated in the above quote). This understanding of sadism revolved around Freuds new insights into the functions of the sexual drive. In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Freud (1905) combined his theory of sexuality with his theory of the neuroses and gave his first account of sadism and masochism. In the Three Essays, Freud decomposed the drive into two separable dimensions, the aim [Ziel] and the object [Objekt]. The sexual aim is the act to which the drive is driven and the sexual object is that person, part-person, animal, or thing, towards which the drive is directed. In this early model, masochism is nothing more than an extension of sadism turned round upon the subjects own self, which thus, to begin with, takes the place of the sexual object (Freud, 1905, p. 158). The sexual aim of the sadist is overstated acts of mastery, cruelty, and violence toward the sexual object, and his sexual object is the person to whom these acts are done. In masochism, the aim of sadism is sustained but, by inversion, the object becomes the subject himself. At this point sadism is clearly an innate and primary manifestation of libido, Freud notes: Cruelty in general comes easily to the childish nature, since the obstacle that brings the instinct for mastery to a halt at another persons pain namely a capacity for pity is developed relatively late (ibid., p. 192). In this early account masochism is understood as secondary: an inversion of sadism. After his account of a primary sadism and secondary masochism in the Three Essays, the problem of masochism was often on Freuds mind as evidenced by his various correspondences. A notable example is Freuds statement in a 1911 letter to Ferenczi: I hardly know a more deceptive and
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more complicated problem in our field than that of masochism (Brabant et al., 1994). In Instincts and their vicissitudes Freud (1915a) again presents the theory of a secondary masochism, which is an inverted sadism:
In the case of the pair of opposites sadismmasochism, the process may be represented as follows: (a) Sadism consists in the exercise of violence or power upon some other person as object. (b) This object is given up and replaced by the subjects self. With the turning round upon the self the change from an active to a passive instinctual aim is also effected. (c) An extraneous person is once more sought as object; this person, in consequence of the alteration which has taken place in the instinctual aim, has to take over the role of the subject. (Freud, 1915a, p. 127)

If the aim of the sadists exaggerated aggressive drive to conquer, master, and control the sexual object cannot be achieved then he unconsciously replaces his sexual object with himself: He becomes his own sexual object. Thus he derives a sadistic pleasure from being dominated, tortured, and mastered by another person with whom he identifies. This, Freud tells us, is the essence of masochism. A child is being beaten: A contribution to the study of the origin of sexual perversions (Freud, 1919) is essentially an essay on masochism, written while Freud was working on Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Brabant et al., 1994). In this essay Freud discusses a common fantasy shared by many of his patients, namely that a child is being beaten. Freud analyzed this phenomenon in terms of its relation to the oedipal complex and, while he found a satisfactory explanation for this occurrence, he remained doubtful as to whether it was purely sexual or purely sadistic. While affirming the secondary nature of masochism, this essay adds guilt issuing from the critical conscious over against the ego (what will later become the superego) as playing a significant role in the creation of masochism. This guilt about the incestuous oedipal object choice of early childhood inevitably leads to repression which transforms the sadistic fantasy, He loves only me, and not the other child, for he is beating it, into a masochistic one, No, he does not love me, for he is beating me. As Freud states: This being beaten is now a convergence of the sense of guilt and sexual love. It is not only the punishment for the forbidden genital relation, but also the regressive substitute for that relation (Freud, 1919, p. 189). Secondary masochism issues from a repressed sadistic fantasy: So far as I know, this is always so; a sense of guilt is invariably the factor that transforms sadism into masochism. But this is certainly not the whole content of masochism (ibid.). While Freud clarified his understanding of secondary masochism in A child is being beaten, he was painfully aware that this was only part of the story. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud (1920) speculatively introduced his new dual drive theory. The death drive allowed for a primary destructive
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masochism, which at this stage was not yet fully articulated by Freud. As discussed above, the death drive is essentially the drive of living things to dissolution, destruction, and death. Freud discovered this primal instinct through the phenomenon of traumatic repetition in the dream and fantasy content of his patients. He discovered, much to his surprise, that the compulsion to repeat can override the pleasure principle, as evidenced by patients who relive traumatic events day after day and night after night. Freud describes this phenomenon, using what is for him an uncharacteristic adjective, demonic. He speculatively suggests that this traumatic repetition can be explained by biological and psychic entropy and that his theory of tension reduction can be explained by this backward pull of the drives. Organic life, says Freud, tends toward the inorganic, death. The striving for rest he coined the nirvana principle and the underlying drive, the death drive. Note this climactic section of the text where Thanatos and the nirvana principle give rise to the possibility of a primary masochism:
Clinical observations led us at that time to the view that masochism, the component instinct which is complementary to sadism, must be regarded as sadism that has been turned round upon the subjects own ego. But there is no difference in principle between an instinct turning from an object to the ego and its turning from the ego to an object which is the new point now under discussion. Masochism, the turning round of the instinct upon the subjects own ego, would in that case be a return to an earlier phase of the instincts history, a regression. The account that was formerly given of masochism requires emendation as being too sweeping in one respect: there might be such a thing as primary masochism a possibility which I had contested at that time. (Freud, 1920, pp. 545)

By the time he published The economic problem of masochism Freud (1924) was certain that there was a primary masochism, which is the inward manifestation of the death drive. In this paper he states: If mental processes are governed by the pleasure principle in such a way that their first aim is the avoidance of unpleasure and the obtaining of pleasure, masochism is incomprehensible (Freud, 1924, p. 159). He explains that masochism appears in three forms: erotogenic, feminine, and moral, but that the erotogenic lies at the bottom of the others (ibid., p. 161). Further exploration of these forms leads Freud to formally assert a primary sadism and masochism that issue from the death drive. Thanatos itself represents a primary masochism and, when this drive is deflected by Eros, it becomes outwardly manifested as the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power (ibid., p. 163). Thus sadism is the outward manifestation of the death drive, and masochism the inward. There is also, in addition, a secondary masochism that can occur: In certain circumstances the sadism, or instinct of destruction, which has been projected, can be once more introjected, turned inwards (ibid., p. 164).
Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but

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R. Grimwade also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? (Freud, 1930, pp. 678)

It is not until Civilization and Its Discontents that Freud (1930) turns his undivided attention to the outward manifestation of the death drive and develops his theory of aggression, mastery, and destruction. After personally witnessing the atrocities of World War I, Freud became convinced, like Schopenhauer before him, that instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests (Freud, 1930, p. 112). Aggressiveness is unquestionably understood as part of human nature even seen in the nursery. For the author of Civilization and Its Discontents, civilization is itself repressive, a place where aggressive drives are inverted, repressed, or sublimated. Since civilization is inherently repressive, we are, in a loose sense, a society of masochists repressing our aggressive and sexual instincts. Many of us are masochists in the true sense deriving pleasure from controlling ourselves, enjoying the repression of our primal instincts by an overactive superego. (Only in society where authority is internalized, does the super-ego torment the sinful ego.) Others are sadists indulging in positions of power and acts of mastery over others. In almost every human relationship sadism and masochism are at play. The student must submit to the teacher, the citizen to the police, and the child to the parent: We all dominate some and prostrate ourselves before others at different points in our lives. And above all these particular social relations the state or civilization, in some sense the ultimate sadist, tramples over the individual who is forced to play the ultimate masochist. Anticipating Foucault, Freud sees the state as having a monopoly on aggression as aggression is the greatest impediment to civilization (Freud, 1930, p. 81). The satisfaction of the destructive instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfilment of the latters old wishes for omnipotence (ibid.). It provides immense satisfaction to release this primal drive for destruction, even when completely detached from Eros. It is this destructive instinct which twists Eros, creating sadism and masochism. In Freuds final analysis, sadism and masochism are merely a result of the great struggle between Eros and Thanatos, between civilization and chaos, between life and death, and we are the active and passive victims of this endless war:
[C]ivilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. These collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common will not hold them together. But mans natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilization. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with it. And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It
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Between the quills: Schopenhauer and Freud on sadism and masochism must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species. And it is this battle of the giants that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven. (Freud, 1930, p. 122)

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Schopenhauer on sadism and masochism

Deceived by the knowledge bound to its service, the will here fails to recognize itself; seeking enhanced well-being in one of its phenomena, it produces great suffering in another. Thus in the fierceness and intensity of its desire it buries its teeth in its own flesh, not knowing that it always injures itself, revealing in this form through the medium of individuation the conflict with itself which bears its inner nature. Tormentor and tormented are one. (Schopenhauer, 1818, p. 354)

For Schopenhauer, pleasure in the pain of others and in ones own pain are both rooted in the will-to-live. While Schopenhauer never knew these terms, we can clearly see that he was thinking of what would be later called sadism and masochism. As we have seen above, the will-to-live manifests itself as our desire for our own preservation and expansion and secondarily for the preservation and expansion of the species. When two individuals meet who are both striving after the same resources, the will-to-live necessitates a clash. Thus the will-to-live accounts for his understanding of a form of primary sadism, our pleasure in acts of other directed cruelty, our Schadenfreude. This pleasure in the pain of others is the pleasure of being and expanding; of fulfilling the primal urges of the will-to-live of the individual. When we are successful, we destroy everything and anything in our path. The role of the intellect, as a survival tool of the will, explains the extreme cruelty of man and the dominion of the strong over the weak. For Schopenhauer, like Freud after him, man is a cruel beast: [The] human race reveals in itself with terrible clearness that conflict, that variance of the will with itself, and we get homo homini lupus (Schopenhauer, 1818, p. 147). For Schopenhauer, cruelty arises out of the extreme pressure of the will which can never be satisfied: [T]he subject of willing is constantly lying on the revolving wheel of Ixion, always drawing water in the sieve of the Danaids, and is the eternally thirsting Tantalus (ibid., p. 196). The inherent inability to escape this miserable fate and achieve the aims of the will-to-live causes deep inner suffering that is then projected onto the external world. In other words, he tries to mitigate his own suffering by the sight of anothers, and at the same time recognizes this as an expression of his own power (ibid., p. 364). The will creates a frustration of instinct, which then must be projected outward. Combined with the narcissistic pleasure involved with the expression of power, cruelty becomes an end in itself. In this sense the willto-live always gives rise to what Freud would recognize as sadistic phenomena. The important, and obvious, similarity between the two theories is that sadistic acts are understood as the manifestation of an overwhelming instinct, or drive. Schopenhauer, like the young Freud, conceived of
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destructiveness and mastery as arising from essentially self-preservative instincts. As discussed above, the most salient difference is that Schopenhauer had no concept equivalent to Freuds death drive. In Schopenhauers view, everything arises from the will-to-live which is an unconscious desire and striving for self-preservation and expansion. Yet, on the level of the noumenon of the will-in-itself there is something akin to the death drive. In the first volume of The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer describes the self-mortifying efforts of the will. The objectified phenomena of the will are always striving for life, either of the species or of the individual, but the will as thing-in-itself is the ultimate cause of everything experienced in the phenomenal world. In some ways this is akin to the unconscious instinctual death drive. Each individual is, on the noumenal8 level, the de-individuated world will and only individuated by experience (as phenomena). In other words, the will is a blind striving on the noumenal level whose turmoil is experienced as endless conflict in the phenomenal world. In some sense, the phenomena of the will are collectively, in themselves, a conflict between life-giving forces and destruction. The phenomena of will act like Eros and Thanatos. However, even this interpretation of will does not account for Freuds death drive proper. As an individuated, intelligible phenomenon there is no equivalent in Schopenhauers philosophy to the death drive. Freuds bizarre and astute conception is his own. Schopenhauer acknowledged that man is also capable of compassion and this notion is rooted in a phenomenon responsible for another form of masochism. For Schopenhauer, compassion is based on self-identification of will when the barrier between ego and non-ego is broken. Due to egodissolution one will often engage in what appear to be masochistic behaviors, risking or subjecting oneself to harm in order to help others with no material advantage to be gained, that is, acts of selfless compassion.9 This destruction of the barrier between ego and non-ego also indicates a primary masochism. In On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing Scheler describes Schopenhauers recounting of the ensuing observation by an English officer in the Indian jungle:
[A] white squirrel, having met the gaze of a snake, hanging on a tree and showing every sign of a mighty appetite for its prey, is so terrified by this that it gradually moves toward instead of away from the snake, and finally throws itself into the open jaws. It is of no consequence whether this be a case of conscious suggestion alone (quite involuntary, of course, on the snakes part), or whether it may not also involve a hypnotic narcosis. The squirrels instinct for self-preservation has succumbed to an ecstatic participation in the object of the snakes own appetitive nisus, namely swallowing. The squirrel identifies in feeling with the snake, and thereupon
8

Schopenhauer, following Kant, divides the world into phenomena, things as they are for us, and noumena, things as they are themselves. The noumena lie behind the mind as imposed forms of space, time, and causation. For Schopenhauer the noumenon is the single world will, an indivisible (and unconscious) primal striving, and the phenomenal world is the individuated world of sense experience. In some ways this distinction is comparable to the psychoanalytic distinction between drive and wish. This allowed Schopenhauer to account for the motives behind self-sacrifice, a notoriously difficult problem for him. Copyright 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

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Between the quills: Schopenhauer and Freud on sadism and masochism spontaneously establishes a corporeal identity with it by disappearing down its throat. (Scheler, 1992, p. 62)10

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This primary masochism is the enjoyment of being an active participant in the process of the others will-to-live. It is the preys identification with the powerful will of the predator. As Scheler puts it: Masochism, whether of the gross or refined type, resembles its opposite, sadism, in being simply a (twofold) manifestation of the erotic power (Scheler, 1992, p. 62). Sexuality as the lord of the world is the secret motivator behind all actions that go beyond mere self-preservation. The very act of being dominated, even being eaten or destroyed is inherently erotic. The ego is caught up in the erotic expression of will and now de-individuated it enjoys unrestrained participation in the world will devouring itself. In this state of pure terror the ego is paralyzed, like the squirrel caught in the gaze of death, and even its will-to-live is forced to submit to the overwhelming dominion of the world will. The chaotic blind striving of the will, the thing-in-itself buttressing the phenomenal world, is exposed in all its glory. It lures its participants into abysmal, ecstatic submission. Yet this is merely a portent of the most significant and primary masochism for Schopenhauer, namely the deep pleasure that results from losing our individuality, from self-dissolution. It is simultaneously horrible and wonderful, pleasurable and painful, enchanting and terrible. This de-individuation is the essence of the poetic art of tragedy for Schopenhauer. It sees through the form of the phenomenon, the principium individuationis; the egoism resting on it (Schopenhauer, 1818, p. 253). The denial of the will-to-live and the dissolution of the individual into the world will is the essence of tragedy.11 For the sadist, and vicarious masochist, pleasure is derived from watching Oedipus tear out his eyes. Witnessing the dissolution of the ego succumbing to its tragic fate, to a state of primal oneness as the world will. The protagonist is sacrificed to the chorus and the eager audience. We indulge in the vicarious sadistic and masochistic pleasure of ego dissolution. The tragic heros dissolution is our own as we are all united by the overwhelming seductive power of the world will. If we compare this notion with Freuds discussion of the oceanic feeling in Chapter One of Civilization and Its Discontents we can almost feel Freud addressing the Schopenhauerian notion expressed above. Freuds friend12 expressed this oceanic feeling as an indissoluble bond, of being one with the world (Freud, 1930, p. 12). Freud explains this feeling by referring to the process of individuation, the establishment of ego boundaries, by which the infantile ego defines, or distinguishes between, everything internal and external. Since this process occurs to varying extent in each individual, its effects can be felt to a greater or lesser extent in later life. Overextended ego
10 Unfortunately I was unable to locate the source of this account in Schopenhauers works. Scheler does not cite his source. 11 Schopenhauers notion of tragedy would influence the young Nietzsche. See The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche, 1872). 12

This friend was apparently the famous French novelist, Romain Rolland. Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92

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boundaries cause an individual to feel at one with or overwhelmed by the world. Freud states, however, that he has never felt this oceanic feeling and sees it as a form of puerile mysticism. Nevertheless, Freud has offered us an alternate, albeit less mystical, explanation of the phenomena of ego-dissolution. There is another form of masochism in Schopenhauers philosophy, the masochism of the ascetic, which he sometimes refers to as the joy of grief. Schopenhauer absolutely idealized the ascetic who denies the will-to-live and all its phenomenal manifestations:
By the expression asceticism I understand in the narrower sense this deliberate breaking of the will by refusing the agreeable and looking for the disagreeable, the voluntarily chosen way of life of penance and self-chastizement, for the constant mortification of the will For only in the case of a few is knowledge sufficient to bring about the denial of the will (Schopenhauer, 1818, p. 392)

This form of masochism, while directed at the will, is manifested in the phenomenal world as a masochistic ego. In Freudian terms it would be a severe sanction prescribed by the superego against the id resulting in the punishment of an unduly masochistic ego. Schopenhauer recommended this ascetic masochism as a method of destroying desire, the cause of suffering, much in the spirit of Buddhist and Christian asceticism. For Schopenhauer, this masochistic practice is the way to ensure that one escapes desire, to overcome the will itself and be free of suffering. Since in Schopenhauers system, like Freuds, pleasure is un-pain, denying the will through ascetic practices is a pleasurable activity:
If the will is to a certain extent broken then practically nothing more is desired, and finally the character shows itself as mild, sad, noble, and resigned. Finally when grief no longer has any definite object, but is extended over the whole of life, it is then to a certain extent self-communion, a withdrawal, a gradual disappearance of the will, the visibility of which, namely the body, is imperceptibly but inwardly undermined by it, so that the person feels a certain loosening of his bonds, a mild foretaste of the death that claims to be the dissolution of the body and of the will at the same time. A secret joy therefore accompanies this grief ... the joy of grief. (Schopenhauer, 1818, p. 396)

Strangely, suicide is not a valid option in Schopenhauers system. Most suicides, he claims, are simply due to an acknowledgement of ones lack of ability to achieve the goals of the will and are therefore essentially an affirmation, not a denial, of the will-to-live.13 It is also pointless, in his view, as killing oneself has no effect on the world will.14 The only way to truly deny the will is to engage in traditional ascetic practices; to abstain from plea-

13

Schopenhauers position on suicide is interesting. He does not advocate suicide but he believes that it should not be illegal for a number of reasons, one of which is that the state is punishing someone for failing at their attempt.

14 There is one notable exception to Schopenhauers general position on suicide: ascetic suicide by starvation. He does not advocate this action directly but he claims that it can be a true denial of the world will. See The World as Will and Representation I, para 69 (Schopenhauer, 1818).

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sure of any kind, to deny desire in order to annihilate it; to cut it off at the source; to beat it out of oneself. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud addresses this issue directly. He discusses various possible ways of contending with suffering, saying that each person, guided by the pleasure principle, his reality principle, and general disposition, will find his own way of seeking pleasure or, more precisely, of avoiding pain. He says that if one wants to take on the dreaded external world alone he can only defend himself by turning away from it. He acknowledges the methods advocated by Schopenhauer: The extreme form of this is brought about by killing off the instincts, as is prescribed by the worldly wisdom of the East and practised by Yoga. If it succeeds, then the subject has, it is true, given up all other activities as well he has sacrificed his life; and, by another path, he has once more only achieved the happiness of quietness (Freud, 1930, p. 29). In these individuals Thanatos has overcome Eros. Their striving for the happiness of quietness, the nirvana principle, draws them from a life of futile striving to what is not properly a life. Freud, like Schopenhauer, acknowledges the inherent discomfort and unease which characterize engaged life. But Freud, rather forlornly, offers us another solution: to regulate our instincts and live in a tenuous and fraught alliance with other people in civilization.15 This is Freuds implicit challenge to Schopenhauers pessimism: a life worth living, a life with emotional attachments to others, is unavoidably characterized by suffering and a life of isolation, the kind of life Schopenhauer advocates, is not properly speaking, a life. This was something that Schopenhauer, with his faith in the solitary and self-sufficient individual, could simply not accept. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Freud said: Let us keep before our eyes the nature of the emotional relations which hold between men in general. According to Schopenhauers famous simile of the freezing porcupines no one can tolerate a too intimate approach to his neighbour (Freud, 1921, p. 101). Schopenhauers fable of the porcupines appears in Volume Two of Parerga and Paralipomena:
One cold winters day, a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order through their mutual warmth to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effect of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now when the need for warmth once more brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so that they were tossed between two evils, until they had discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. Thus the need for society which springs from the emptiness and monotony of mens lives drives them together; but their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities and insufferable drawbacks once more drive them apart. The mean distance which they finally discover, and which enables them to endure being together, is politeness and good manners. Whoever does not keep to this is told in England to

15 This is in complete opposition to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauers political philosophy is negligible. It is loosely based on his morality and mentioned only rarely in his works. For him, the state, as long as it must exist, should serve three essential functions; to protect the individual from external enemies, internal enemies, and from the state itself (Magee, 1989, p. 205). If the state stretched itself beyond serving these basic functions, Schopenhauer saw it as unwelcome interference. For Schopenhauer social life was a burden. As we have seen, Schopenhauer advocated a complete withdrawal from social and political life.

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R. Grimwade keep his distance. By virtue thereof, it is true that the need for mutual warmth will be only imperfectly satisfied, but, on the other hand, the prick of the quills will not be felt. Yet whoever has a great deal of internal warmth of his own will prefer to keep away from society in order to avoid giving or receiving trouble and annoyance. (Schopenhauer, 1851c, pp. 6512, emphasis mine)

For Schopenhauer, those with internal warmth will avoid society altogether, while the rest of us oscillate between a state of empty longing and the sting of each others quills in a desperate but futile attempt to find a balance between our unachievable desires and our pain. Freud too recognized the delicate balance of life in civilization. According to him, aversion and hostility characterize almost every relationship:
The evidence of psycho-analysis shows that almost every intimate emotional relation between two people which lasts for some time marriage, friendship, the relations between parents and children contains a sediment of feelings of aversion and hostility, which only escapes perception as a result of repression. This is less disguised in the common wrangles between business partners or in the grumbles of a subordinate at his superior. The same thing happens when men come together in larger units. Every time two families become connected by a marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighbouring towns each is the others most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt. Closely related races keep one another at arms length; the South German cannot endure the North German, the Englishman casts every kind of aspersion upon the Scot, the Spaniard despises the Portuguese. We are no longer astonished that greater differences should lead to an almost insuperable repugnance, such as the Gallic people feel for the German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the white races for the coloured. (Freud, 1921, p. 101)

As we have noted above, masochistic tendencies and practices are essential to life in society. To live in society we must submit to the laws of the state. We must repress our natural aggressive and sexual drives. It seems that, for every blow thrown, there is someone only too willing to turn the other cheek. Perhaps this social masochism serves Eros in its civilization-building activity by drawing the masochists together with the sadists that oppress them. Our masochistic tendencies and identifications are essential parts of the glue that binds us together. And our sadistic tendencies, our fear and hatred for what is other, even in the slightest respect, violently separate us. Perhaps, society essentially involves a masochistic binding and sadistic splitting. Perhaps, following Schopenhauer, these two impulses drive for individuation and the drive for unity are incompatible. In our comparison of Freud and Schopenhauers views of sadism and masochism, we have thus far accounted for all three forms of masochism Freud presents in The economic problem of masochism but one: the feminine. (This is a complex topic that has been treated extensively elsewhere. For our purposes a few remarks will have to suffice.) We accounted for the Schopenhauerean equivalent to erotogenic masochism with his notion of ego-dissolution, and we have accounted for a form of moral masochism in his notion of the ascetic denial of the will. All that remains is feminine masochism, the existence and nature of which (unfortunately) both theorists
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agreed upon and for which both have been, and should be, held accountable. The so-called natural sexual masochism of women is evidenced throughout the works of both Freud and Schopenhauer. For Freud, women are biologically sexually passive or submissive and as such they have an innate masochism. The male aggressor has a biological drive to dominate and subdue a female. In his words from Three Essays: The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness a desire to subjugate; the biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing (Freud, 1905, pp. 1567). The obvious inverse assumption is that women lack this aggression and instead are passive recipients and have an inherent sexual masochism. In A child is being beaten Freud acknowledges there are men who enjoy a feminine form of masochism, but the feminine form itself is characteristically female implying a natural feminine masochism (Freud, 1919, p. 161). As Greer states in The Female Eunuch: [Freud] did not suggest that one way Eros could recruit his forces would be by re-endowing women with their sexuality, their fealty to Eros. Instead, he and his followers elaborated the concept of female masochism as divinely ordained by biology (Greer, 1970, p. 106). Schopenhauers infamous views on women are well known, and as we might expect he has a much stronger view of the natural feminine passivity and submissiveness. In his view, women as the weaker sex ... are driven to rely not on force, but on cunning and what there ought to be is housewives and girls who hope to become housewives and therefore educated, not in arrogant haughtiness, but in domesticity and submissiveness (Schopenhauer, 1851a, pp. 83, 87). In his infamous remarks on women, Schopenhauer portrays a masculine activity as the desire and subsequent striving for a domination and mastery. For Schopenhauer, women are merely the passive objects of active male desire. Unfortunately, the father of psychoanalysis and the great pessimist were not radical and revolutionary in every respect.

Conclusion
We have seen how Schopenhauer and Freud understood human life as a sadisticmasochistic relation fundamentally characterized by suffering, and how each theorist tried to solve this problem. Schopenhauers fundamental theoretical assertion, that the complete denial and suppression of instinct was necessary to alleviate suffering, is in complete opposition to Freuds view. Freud offered us an alternative to Schopenhauers life denying worldweary pessimism: the good life, a life of rewarding emotional attachments inevitably involves a certain amount of suffering. Schopenhauer could not accept this fragile and uncomfortable balance. For Schopenhauer, no shared joy was worth the pain of life in civilization. At the end of our inquiry it is prudent, despite my earlier rejection of the question, to briefly return to one of the most over-discussed questions in the SchopenhauerFreud literature, namely, what was Schopenhauers influence on Freud? My response, as writing this essay has made clear to me, is to take Freud at his word. Freud emerged from the intellectual background
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of a Germany still recoiling from the influence of Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and others. Freud was certainly influenced by Schopenhauer early in his intellectual life regardless of whether he read him then or only later. Was there a German intellectual who escaped the influence of the great pessimist whose World as Will and Representation lay on every bourgeois coffee-table? It seems that, while Schopenhauer anticipated some early psychoanalytic notions, he only lay some of the basic groundwork for Freud. Schopenhauer could never have imagined what Freud would later do with these vague and general notions. Schopenhauer, as a child of his age, simply lacked Freuds extensive and nuanced understanding of mental phenomena but was able to infer many psychological truths by the sheer force of his genius. Now it is time to finally move past this distracting question and listen to Freud:
You may perhaps shrug your shoulders and say: That isnt natural science, its Schopenhauers philosophy! But, Ladies and Gentlemen, why should not a bold thinker have guessed something that is afterwards confirmed by sober and painstaking detailed research? (Freud, 1933, p. 107)

Translations of summary
ber Sadismus und Masochismus. Esist allZwischen den Stacheln: Schopenhauer und Freud u gemein bekannt, dass Sigmund Freud (18561939) und Arthur Schopenhauer (17881860) eine gemeinsame Weltanschauung teilten. Jeder, der mit den Arbeiten dieser beiden Denker vertraut ist, kann ihre allgemeinen philosophischen Affinitten erkennen. Beide Mnner waren pessimistisch im Hinblick auf die Kraft des menschlichen Verstandes und schrieben das menschliche Verhalten machtvollen unbewussten Krften zu, und infolgedessen waren beide hchst skeptisch, was die Zukunft der menschlichen Gesellschaft betrifft. Gesttzt auf frhere Literatur vergleicht diese Abhandlung die philosophische Theorie Schopenhauers mit der psychoanalytischen Theorie Freuds. Wir kommen zu dem Ergebnis, dass obwohl Schopenhauer und Freud eine gemeinsame philosophische Orientierung hatten und die gleichen grundlegenden Probleme des Lebens in der Zivilisation diagnostizierten sie vordergrndig hnliche, dennoch letztlich sehr unterschiedliche Lsungen vorschlugen. Indem wir den Blick auf die jeweilige Auffassung der beiden Denker ber Sadismus und Masochismus konzentrieren, versuchen wir in diesem Essay, die Dimensionen dieses radikalen Pessimismus zu verstehen und zu akzeptieren. Entre las plumas fuentes: Schopenhauer y Freud sobre el sadismo y el masoquismo. Es comnmente sabido que Sigmund Freud (18561939) y Arthur Schopenhauer (17881860) compartan una visin de mundo. Todo aqul que conoce la obra de estos dos pensadores debera identificar sus afinidades filosficas generales. Los dos eran pesimistas respecto del poder de la razn humana, y atribuan la conducta humana a fuerzas inconscientes poderosas. Como resultado, ambos eran profundamente escpticos acerca del futuro de la sociedad humana. A partir de la literatura preexistente, este ensayo compara la teora filosfica de Schopenhauer con la teora psicoanaltica de Freud. Encontramos que, si bien ambos comparten una orientacin filosfica y diagnostican los mismos problemas fundamentales de la vida en la civilizacin, proponen soluciones ostensiblemente similares pero, en ltima instancia, muy diferentes. Centrndose en la nocin de sadismo y masoquismo de cada uno de estos autores, este ensayo intenta entender y asumir las dimensiones de este pesimismo radical. ` propos du sadisme et du masochisme. Chacun sait Entre les plumes: Schopenhauer et Freud a que Sigmund Freud (18561939) et Arthur Schopenhauer (178818860) partageaient la mme vision du monde. Quiconque connat leurs uvres respectives saura reconnatre sans difficult leurs affinits philosophiques. Tous deux portaient un regard pessimiste sur le pouvoir de la raison humaine et attribuaient le comportement humain des forces inconscientes puissantes, ce qui fait quils taient terriblement sceptiques concernant lavenir de la socit. Sinspirant dtudes antrieures, lauteur de cet article tablit une comparaison entre la thorie philosophique de Schopenhauer et la thorie psychanalytique de Freud. Il considre que bien que Schopenhauer et Freud partagent la mme orientation philosophique et le mme diagnostic quant aux problmes fondamentaux inhrents la vie dans la civilisation, les solutions quils

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proposent sont en fin de compte radicalement diffrentes contrairement aux apparences. En centrant sa rflexion sur les notions de sadisme et de masochisme propres chacun de ces penseurs, lauteur tente de saisir les dimensions relatives ce pessimisme foncier. Questioni spinose: Sadismo e Masochismo in Shopenhauer e Freud. Il fatto che Sigmund Freud (18561939) e Arthur Schopenhauer (17881860) avessero la stessa visione del mondo cosa ben risaputa. Chiunque conosca lopera di questi due pensatori riconosce anche le loro generali affinit filosofiche. Entrambi, esprimendo tutto il loro pessimismo nei confronti del potere della ragione umana e attribuendo il comportamento umano a potenti forze inconsce, hanno di fatto mostrato un profondo scetticismo circa il futuro dellumanit. Partendo dalla letteratura esistente in capitolo, questo lavoro mette a confronto la teoria filosofica di Shopenhauer con quella psicoanalitica di Freud. A conclusione del contributo viene sottolineato che sebbene vi sia una condivisione dellorientamento filosofico e la stessa visione delle cause di afflizione della vita civilizzata, questi due autori propongono tuttavia soluzioni che solo a prima vista sono simili ma risultano, in ultima analisi, ben diverse. Il lavoro, partendo dal significato che ognuno dei due pensatori attribuivano a sadismo e maschismo, si sviluppa nel tentativo di comprendere e integrare le dimensioni del loro radicale pessimismo.

References
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