Reading, Writing, and the Whip

When Jean Jacques Rousseau was eight years old, he was sent to Bossey, a village near Geneva, to board with Minister Lambercier for educational purposes. Miss Lambercier, Rousseau's nursemaid, was given the task of disciplining his brother and him. If unruly, the boys were spanked, a punishment that Rousseau found "much less terrible than the idea, and what is still more unaccountable, this punishment increased [his] affection for the person who had inflicted it."¹ He grew to crave being beaten, "for a degree of sensuality had mingled with the smart and shame, which left more desire than fear of a repetition."² He did fear Miss Lambercier's wrath enough to avoid further actual beatings; however, he began to fantasize about a woman who would treat him in the same despotic manner.³ Rousseau wrote, "To fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon, were for me the most exquisite enjoyments, and the more my blood was inflamed by the efforts of a lively imagination the more I acquired the appearance of a whining lover."⁴ These ideas filled Rousseau with humiliation and excitation; they formed the substance of his first confession and lay the groundwork for the rest of the Confessions, which would become celebrated in the nineteenth century as one of the first modern autobiographies.⁵ Reading Rousseau in late nineteenth-century Austria, Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, an eminent psychiatrist in Graz, labeled him a masochist.

Masochism was introduced to the scientific community in 1890 as part of the sixth edition of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der Psychopathia Sexualis. Though flagellation, a condition in which being whipped produced sexual excitation, was already widely known, masochism was a new perversion. Masochism, according to Krafft-Ebing, was not about pain, but rather about submission; he considered it a perversion of agency. At the suggestion of a patient, Krafft-Ebing derived the label, "masochism," from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a novelist and history professor at the University of Graz. The patient described his enjoyment reading Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, which tells the story of Severin, a young aristocrat in love with Wanda, a beautiful, wealthy, aristocratic Slavic widow. In the novella, Wanda treats Severin as a slave as they travel around Italy.⁶ Tableaus of domination form the bulk of the novella and provided grist for the patient's fantasies. Krafft-Ebing drew on Rousseau's autobiographical insight and Sacher-Masoch's novella to form masochism, a new diagnostic category whose "essential element" was "the feeling of subjection to the woman."⁷

While noting Rousseau's interest in flagellation, Krafft-Ebing described Rousseau's yearning for "the furrowed brow, the upraised hand, the severe look, the imperious attitude" as symptoms of masochism.⁸ Under Krafft-Ebing's gaze, Rousseau's desire for punishment became a paradigmatic example of masochism.⁹ According to Krafft-Ebing, the main marker of Rousseau's masochism was "the feeling of subjection to the woman"; Rousseau "love[d] the proud, scornful woman crushing him under her feet by the weight of her royal wrath."¹⁰

Understanding how and why Krafft-Ebing interpreted Rousseau's behavior as masochistic illustrates masochism's intimate connection with literature and its attendant practices of reading and writing.¹¹ Reading masochism as a literary phenomenon means exploring several layers of relationships—of literature and performance, of textuality and subjectivity—and the relationships among various practices of reading. I start with Krafft-Ebing and his practices of reading, examine the relationship between literature and practice, and end with an exploration of diagnosis and writing. Rousseau's Confessions exemplifies these rich layers, as a text with a life and readership of its own and as writing exercise, and exemplifies what Michel Foucault termed a "technology of the self."¹² The link I am forging between Krafft-Ebing and Foucault's technologies of the self offers a reevaluation of Krafft-Ebing and pre-psychoanalytic studies of sexuality.

History has not been kind to Psychopathia Sexualis. Historians of psychiatry describe this compendium of sexual perversity as a footnote...