Masochism occupies a remarkably contested terrain within the depth-psychology corpus, drawing sharply divergent interpretations from its classical psychoanalytic formulation through archetypal and existential revisions. Freud and his immediate circle treat masochism as rooted in libidinal economy: a primary masochism in the ego amplifies the superego’s sadism and is linked, in the later metapsychology, to the death instinct turned inward. Karl Abraham documents its clinical phenomenology in hysterical dream-states and erotic self-punishment, while Rank traces the masochist’s aim to the pleasurable re-establishment of intrauterine conditions disturbed by the birth trauma. Fromm radically repositions the term within social psychology: masochistic strivings, whether directed toward a person, institution, or god, serve the single function of dissolving the burden of individual selfhood and escaping the anxiety of freedom — making masochism a socio-political as much as a clinical phenomenon. Hillman mounts the most thoroughgoing archetypal critique: Krafft-Ebing’s nosological act of naming was itself a cultural symptom, reducing what the collective psyche expressed as religious-erotic passion — the gloria passionis — to a sexual anomaly amenable to causal-historical repair. Hillman insists masochism must be read as an archetypal expression related to dying and the soul’s encounter with Eros. Herman adds a feminist-political dimension, noting the diagnostic category’s misapplication to traumatized women. Lyn Cowan’s Jungian monograph, cited in Hillman’s bibliography, anchors the term firmly in the archetypal literature. The tensions — clinical versus archetypal, pathological versus meaningful, individual versus collective — give the term unusual theoretical density across the library.