Sadism occupies a densely contested position in the depth-psychology corpus, traversing clinical sexology, character analysis, developmental theory, and social psychology. Freud’s foundational contribution in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality establishes sadism as a component instinct, inseparable from its masochistic complement: the sadist is always simultaneously a masochist, the active and passive aspects of a single perversion. Abraham elaborates this instinctual substrate developmentally, tracing sadism to oral-cannibalistic and anal-muscular sources and locating its peak in what he terms a ‘phase of maximal sadism.’ Klein receives this developmental account and transforms it into the paranoid-schizoid position, where infantile sadism is understood as the projection of the death instinct onto objects, with persecutory anxiety perpetually reinforcing aggressive impulse. Fromm effects the most decisive sociological reorientation: in Escape from Freedom sadism is reconceived not as a fixed perversion but as a character structure — the drive to dominate, exploit, and incorporate — arising from isolation, powerlessness, and thwarted spontaneity, and constitutively fused with masochism in the sado-masochistic authoritarian character. Rank offers a still more archaic reading, anchoring the sadist’s violence in the expulsive hatred of birth trauma. Kalsched, working later, connects Freud’s superego sadism to the self-care system’s diabolical repetitions. Across these positions, the key tensions are: instinct versus character structure; individual pathology versus cultural norm; and domination versus destruction as distinct aims.
We find three kinds of sadistic tendencies, more or less closely knit together. One is to make others dependent on oneself and to have absolute and unrestricted power over them, so as to make of them nothing but instruments.
Fromm taxonomizes sadism into three interlocking tendencies — domination, exploitation, and pleasurable destruction — constituting the core of the authoritarian character structure.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
sadism is not identical with destructiveness, although it is to a great extent blended with it. The destructive person wants to destroy the object… The sadist wants to dominate his object and therefore suffers a loss if his object disappears.
Fromm draws a precise conceptual distinction between sadism, which requires the object’s continued existence for domination, and destructiveness, which seeks the object’s elimination.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.
Freud establishes the constitutional inseparability of sadism and masochism as active and passive expressions of a single underlying perversion.
, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905thesis
Sadism aims at incorporation of the object; destructiveness at its removal. Sadism tends to strengthen the atomized individual by the domination over others; destructiveness by the absence of any threat from the outside.
Fromm refines his typology by contrasting sadism’s incorporative, strengthening aim with the purely eliminative logic of destructiveness.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
A person can be entirely dominated by his sadistic strivings and consciously believe that he is motivated only by his sense of duty… Nevertheless, any close analysis of his behavior, his phantasies, dreams, and gestures, would show the sadistic impulses operating in deeper layers of his personality.
Fromm argues that sadistic character structure operates largely unconsciously and is routinely rationalized as duty or principle, requiring depth-analytic methods to discern.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
the sadist personifies the unquenchable hatred of one who has been expelled; he really attempts with his fully grown body to go back into the place whence he came.
Rank derives sadism from the expulsive rage of birth trauma, interpreting the sadist’s violent acts as an archaic attempt to re-enter the maternal body.
, The Trauma of Birth, 1924thesis
biting represents the original form taken by the sadistic impulses… the sadistic impulses spring from a number of different sources, among which we may mention in especial the excremental ones. We must also bear in mind the close association of sadism with the muscular system.
Abraham traces sadism developmentally to oral-cannibalistic, excremental, and muscular sources, insisting on its multi-determined instinctual origins rather than a single derivation.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
Goebbels gives an accurate description of the dependence of the sadistic person on his objects; how weak and empty he feels unless he has power over somebody and how this power gives him new strength.
Fromm reads Goebbels’s own self-description as clinical evidence that sadistic power-hunger compensates an underlying sense of emptiness and existential weakness.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting
in a final effort to explain the superego’s sadism against the ego, Freud (1924) linked the death instinct with his superego theory by proposing a primary masochism in the ego which amplified the sadism of the superego.
Kalsched reconstructs Freud’s late metapsychology in which superego sadism is grounded in the death instinct, with primary masochism providing the ego-side of this destructive dynamic.
, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996supporting
I there described the confluence of aggressive impulses from all sources as the ‘phase of maximal sadism’. I still believe that aggressive impulses are at their height during the stage in which persecutory anxiety predominates.
Klein locates maximum infantile sadism within the paranoid-schizoid position, where persecutory anxiety and aggressive projection mutually reinforce one another.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting
they also stood for his own sadism, each animal representing dangerous objects — persecutors — which he had tamed and could use as protection against his enemies.
Klein illustrates through clinical material how the child’s own sadism is projected onto dangerous animal-objects and subsequently introjected as internalized persecutors.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting
The one impels the individual to dominate his sexual object, the other to submit to its will… If sublimation does not take place we get the perversions called sadism and masochism respectively.
Abraham frames sadism and masochism as a paired set of component instincts — domination and submission — whose sublimation yields pity and related social feelings, while failure of sublimation produces perversion.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
Darwin’s theory as such was not an expression of the feelings of a sado-masochistic character… For Hitler, however, it was an expression of and simultaneously a justification for his own sadism.
Fromm demonstrates how ideological systems — here Social Darwinism — are appropriated by the sadistic character as rationalizations for pre-existing drives toward domination.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting
as long as masochism is regarded as a sexual anomaly only and sexuality is taken only as a concrete ‘function,’ the psychological import is reduced to piecemeal localizations in the sexual function or in one’s personal history.
Hillman critiques the reductive clinical framing of masochism (and by implication sadism) as sexual anomaly, urging instead an archetypal reading that connects it to dying and soul-making.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972aside
sadism in, 277; self-reproach in, 277, 419, 461
Abraham’s index entry marks sadism as a recognized feature of melancholia within his libido-developmental schema, linking it to self-reproach and incorporative regression.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927aside