What collapses first in the psyche: love without aggression, or aggression without love?

In clinical practice, this question does not arise as an abstract dilemma. For patients with a masochistic organization, a reduction in pain often does not bring relief; instead, it may evoke anxiety, disorganization, or a loss of the sense of connection with the other. Where pain disappears, love may become empty or inaccessible.

For example, the loss of a dramatic yet tightly bound relationship may be experienced when a “sadistic” partner becomes kinder and less conflictual. When tension and aggression return to the relationship, however, the sense of connection often re-emerges.

It is precisely this clinical tension between love and aggression—their fusion or the inability to separate them—that was described by Dr. Otto Kernberg, M.D.  In his view, masochism may be described as a broad field of phenomena, both normal and pathological, centered on motivated self-destructiveness and a conscious or unconscious pleasure in suffering. It is a field with imprecise boundaries:

- At one extreme, we find such severe self-destructiveness that self-elimination or elimination of self-awareness acquires a central motivational importance and masochistic psychopathology merges with the psychopathology of primitive and severe aggression.

- At the other extreme, a healthy capacity for self-sacrifice on behalf of family, others, or an ideal, the sublimatory functions of superego determined willingness to suffer, does not warrant being considered pathological.

According to Dr. Otto Kernberg, our prolonged infantile dependency and the necessary internalization of parental authority during our protracted childhood and adolescence make it almost impossible to conceive of a superego that

would not include masochistic components—that is, some unconsciously

motivated need for suffering and its underlying dynamics.

Dr. Kernberg argues that between these two extremes lies a broad spectrum of masochistic psychopathology, the common elements of which center on unconscious conflicts concerning sexuality and the superego.

In the realm of moral masochism, a price is paid in order to obtain pleasure: the transformation of pain into erotic pleasure, the integration of aggression within love, is played out in the relation between the self and a superego introject. Because of unconscious feelings of guilt, to suffer at the will of a punishing introject is to recover the love of the object and the union with it; in this way, aggression is absorbed into love.

This pattern can often be observed in individuals who, without being aware of it, subtly provoke criticism or punishment from those close to them. In response, they experience a paradoxical yet familiar sense of relief: for a while, tension subsides, and an illusion of warmth or closeness in the relationship with the partner emerges.

Alternatively, a person may repeatedly place themselves in situations of suffering or failure as a way of expiating an unconscious sense of guilt.

The same dynamic is also played out in sexual masochism as a specific perversion: the obligatory experience of pain, submission, and humiliation to obtain sexual gratification is the unconscious punishment for the forbidden oedipal implications of genital sexuality.

Masochism as part of polymorphous perverse infantile sexuality, as we have seen, constitutes a central aspect of sexual excitement, based on the potentially erotic response to the experience of discrete physical pain and the symbolic shift of this capacity (to transform pain into sexual excitement) into the capacity to absorb or integrate hatred into love. The object of sexual desire is originally a teasing object, the sensually stimulating and frustrating mother, and erotic excitement, with its aggressive component, is a basic response to a desired, frustrating, and exciting object.

In clinical work, this may manifest in fantasies or sexual scenarios in which pain and submission are not experienced as a threat but rather as a condition for arousal and intimacy.

Under optimal circumstances, the painful aspects of erotic excitement are transformed into pleasure, heightening sexual excitement and the sense of closeness to the erotic object. The internalization of the erotic object, the object of desire, also includes the demands made by that object as a condition for maintaining its love. The aggressive implications of pain (the aggression from or

attributed to the desired object, and the rageful reaction to pain) are thus woven into or fused with love as an indispensable part of erotic excitement, as part of the "moral defense".

Fusion with the object of desire, however, is fostered under conditions not only of intense erotic excitement and love but also of extreme pain and hatred. When interactions with mother are chronically aggressive or abusive, frustrating, and teasing, the intensity of the infant's physical or psychic pain cannot be absorbed into a normal erotic response or into sadistic, yet protective and reliable, superego precursors; it is instead directly transformed into aggression. Excessive pain is transformed into aggression and that excessive aggression distorts the development of all psychic structures and interferes with the elaboration of aggression in fantasy as opposed to its direct expression in behavior. Excessive aggression restricts the realm of unconscious psychic experience by primordial somatization or acting out.

Under extreme circumstances, excessive aggression is reflected in primitive self-destructiveness.

Severe early illness with prolonged pain, physical or sexual assault, and chronically abusive and chaotic relations with a parental object may all be reflected in severe destructiveness and self-destructiveness producing the syndrome of malignant narcissism. This syndrome is characterized by a pathological grandiose self infiltrated with aggression, which reflects the fusion of the self with the sadistic object. The fantasy might be described as:

"I am alone in my fear, rage, and pain. In becoming one with my tormentor, I can protect myself by destroying myself or my self-awareness. Now I no longer need to fear pain or death because in inflicting them upon myself or others I become superior to all others who induce or fear these calamities."

Under less extreme circumstances, the sadistic object may be internalized into an integrated yet sadistic superego and the fusion with it reflected in the morally tinged desire to destroy oneself. The delusional conviction of one's badness, in psychotic depression, the desire to destroy the fantasied bad self, and the unconscious fantasy of becoming reunited with a loved object by self-sacrifice may reflect these conditions. Under still less severe conditions, masochistic suffering may provide a sense of moral superiority,- "injustice-gathering" patients typically represent the more moderate compromise formation of moral masochism.

But if aggression is absorbed into the superego in the form of internalization of a punishing yet needed object of desire, erotic masochism also may "contain" the aggression, not in the usual sadomasochistic aspects of sexual excitement, but in the condensation of sexual excitement with a total submission to the desired object and the wish to be humiliated by that object. Masochism as a restrictive, obligatory sexual practice thus transforms ordinary polymorphous perverse infantile sexuality into a "paraphilia" or perversion in a strict sense,- by the same token, it may protect psychic development from the general infiltration of aggression into the superego by internalizing the sadistic object. Apparently, two kinds of mental organization are built up separately, in some patients whose physical or sexual abuse has been more limited, or when incest occurs in the context of other relatively normal object relations, or when punishment itself has been erotized in actual beating experiences and related interactions.

A sexual perversion established early might later be reinforced by defenses against castration anxiety and unconscious guilt derived from advanced oedipal conflicts, eventually "containing" these conflicts. However, the ascendance of a strict but well-integrated superego that internalizes a repressive sexual morality may contribute to the transformation of earlier sexual masochism into moral masochism, transmuting the symbolic meanings of sexual pain, submission, and humiliation into psychic suffering, submission to the superego, and acting out of unconscious guilt in humiliating or self-defeating behavior.

In summary,Otto Kernberg describing three levels of psychic organization at which primitive severe aggression is incorporated into the psychic apparatus:

• primitive self-destructiveness,
• erotic masochism,
• moral masochism.

In all types, secondary narcissistic elaborations of masochistic trends contribute to the subject's rationalizing and secondarily defending the characterological, behavioral manifestations of these masochistic patterns.

Thus, in a masochistic organization of the psyche, what proves decisive is not a choice between love and aggression, but the capacity to hold them together. Where aggression becomes separated from love, the bond with the object loses its intensity and turns empty; where love becomes separated from aggression, it ceases to be psychologically convincing and can no longer sustain a sense of closeness.

From this perspective, what breaks down first is neither love nor aggression as such, but their integration. It is this loss of integration that underlies the transition from erotic and moral masochism to primitive self-destructiveness, in which pain no longer contains aggression but becomes the sole means of preventing psychic disintegration. In this sense, masochism appears not only as a source of suffering, but also as an attempt to preserve love in situations where the alternative would be uncontained aggression or psychic emptiness.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy