Sadism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The achievement of pleasure, either sexual or not, by inflicting pain or suffering on others. Best defined as cruelty in the non-sexual sense.
Sadism is the derivation of pleasure as a result of the suffering of others. Aspects of it include
- Sadism and masochism in sexual contexts
- Sadism and masochism as medical terms
- Sadistic personality disorder
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Etymology
Named after the Marquis de Sade, famed for his libertine writings depicting the pleasure of inflicting pain to others. The word for "sadism" (sadisme) is forged or acknowledged in the 1834 posthumous reprint of French lexicographer Boiste's Dictionnaire universel de la langue française; it is reused along with "sadist" (sadique) in 1862 by French critic Sainte-Beuve in his commentary of Flaubert's novel Salammbô; it is reused (possibly independantly) in 1886 by Austrian psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis which popularized it; it is directly reused in 1905 by Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality which definitely established the word.
Definition
- (mainly psychiatric) the enjoyment of inflicting pain
- achievement of sexual gratification by inflicting pain on others
- gaining sexual excitement and satisfaction by watching pain inflicted by others on their victims
- a morbid form of enjoyment achieved by acting cruel to another, or others.
- (In general use) deliberate cruelty either mental or physical also applicable to the cruelty inflicted upon animals whether for sexual gratification or not.
Sexual sadism
- "Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat." (Laura Mulvey, 1975, 29).
- "Mes fantasmes sado-érotiques, je n'en ai nullement honte, je les mets en scène: la vie fantasmatique est ce que l'être humain doit revendiquer le plus hautement". --Alain Robbe-Grillet
- Sadism is not a name finally given to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive cultural fact which appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century, and which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western imagination: unreason transformed into delirium of the heart, madness of desire, the insane dialogue of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite." --Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
Related terms
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