sman as Bismarck.
Thus a minor degree of the masochistic tendency may be said to be fairly
common, while its more pronounced manifestations are more common than
pronounced sadism.[94] It very frequently affects persons of a sensitive,
refined, and artistic temperament. It may even be said that this tendency
is in the line of civilization. Krafft-Ebing points out that some of the
most delicate and romantic love-episodes of the Middle Ages are distinctly
colored by masochistic emotion.[95] The increasing tendency to masochism
with increasing civilization becomes explicable if we accept Colin Scott's
"secondary law of courting" as accessory to the primary law that the male
is active, and the female passive and imaginatively attentive to the
states of the excited male. According to the secondary law, "the female
develops a superadded activity, the male becoming relatively passive and
imaginatively attentive to the psychical and bodily states of the
female."[96] We may probably agree that this "secondary law of courting"
does really represent a tendency of love in individuals of complex and
sensitive nature, and the outcome of such a receptive attitude on the part
of the male is undoubtedly in well-marked cases a desire of submission to
the female's will, and a craving to experience in some physical or psychic
form, not necessarily painful, the manifestations of her activity.
When we turn from vague and unpronounced forms of the masochistic tendency
to the more definite forms in which it becomes an unquestionable sexual
perversion, we find a very eminent and fairly typical example in Rousseau,
an example all the more interesting because here the subject has himself
portrayed his perversion in his famous _Confessions_. It is, however, the
name of a less eminent author, the Austrian novelist, Sacher-Masoch, which
has become identified with the perversion through the fact that
Krafft-Ebing fixed upon it as furnishing a convenient counterpart to the
term "sadism." It is on the strength of a considerable number of his
novels and stories, more especially of _Die Venus im Pelz_, that
Krafft-Ebing took the scarcely warrantable liberty of identifying his
name, while yet living, with a sexual perversion.
Sacher-Masoch's biography has been written with intimate
knowledge and much candor by C.F. von Schlichtegroll
(_Sacher-Masoch und der Masochismus_, 1901) and, more indirectly,
by his first wife Wanda von Sacher-Mas
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