Followup to Stuck in the middle with Bruce:
Bruce is a description of masochistic personality disorder. Bruce's dysfunctional behavior may or may not be related to sexual masochism [safe for work], which is demonized by most people in America. Yet there are ordinary, socially-accepted behaviors that seem partly masochistic to me:
- Eating spicy food
- Listening to the music of Anton Webern or Alban Berg (not trying to be funny; this is very serious)
- Listening to music turned up so loud that it hurts
- Fiction
- Movies, especially horror movies
- Roller coasters
- Saunas
- Enjoying exercise
- Being Bruce
Question 1: Can you list more?
Question 2: Doubtless some of the behaviors I listed have completely different explanations, some of which might not involve masochism at all. Which do you think involve enjoying pain? Can you cluster them by causal mechanism?
Question 3: When we find ourselves acting masochistically, should we try to "correct" it? Or is it part of a healthy human's nature? If so, what's the evolutionary-psych explanation? (I was surprised not to find any evo-psych explanations for masochism on the web; or even any general theory of masochism that tried to unite two different behaviors. All I found were the ideas that sexual masochism is caused by bad childhood models of love, and that masochistic personality is caused by other, unspecified bad experiences. No suggestion that masochism is part of our normal pleasure mechanism.)
Some hypotheses:
- Evolution implemented "need to explore" (in the "exploration/exploitation" sense) as pleasure in new experiences, and adaptation to any particular often-repeated stimulus. This could result in seeking ever-higher levels of stimulation, even above the pain threshold. (This could affect a culture as well as an organism, giving the progression Vivaldi -> Bach -> Mozart -> Beethoven -> Wagner -> Stravinsky -> Berg -> screw it, let's invent rock and roll and start over. My original belief was that this progression was caused by people trying to signal sophistication, rather than by honest enjoyment of music. But maybe some people <DELETION of "jaded"> honestly enjoy Berg.)
- We have a "pain thermostat" to get us to explore / prevent us from being too cowardly, and modern life leaves us below our set point. (Is masochism more prevalent now than in the bad old days?)
- An objection to this is that sometimes, when people are in emotional pain, they work through it by throwing themselves into further emotional pain (e.g., by listening to Pink Floyd).
- An objection to this objection is that primal scream therapy seems not actually to work except in the short term.
- An objection to this is that sometimes, when people are in emotional pain, they work through it by throwing themselves into further emotional pain (e.g., by listening to Pink Floyd).
- Pain triggers endorphins in order to help us fight or flee, and it feels good.
- We enjoy fighting and athletic competition, and pain is associated with these things we enjoy.
My guess is that, if it's a side-effect (e.g., 3) or a non-causal association (4), it's okay to eliminate masochism. Otherwise, that could be risky.
These all lead up to Question 4, which is a fun-theory question: Would purging ourselves of masochism make life less fun?
ADDED: Question 5: Can we train ourselves not to be Bruce without damaging our enjoyment of these other things?
I don't know, but not "masochism." Whether these behaviors even hang together as a "general phenomenon" is an empirical question that is not yet answered. Let's look at some of Phil's examples:
Are people who do this actually enjoying the pain, or they merely tolerate it because they like loud music?
I once read that one of the main enjoyments in horror movies is not watching it, but the relief afterward; if true, this would be a difference from masochism. Another difference from masochism is that horror movies may be experienced as scary, while in masochism, sensations that would normally be painful are not necessarily experienced as painful.
However, a component that horror movies share with masochism and rollercoasters is arousal of the sympathetic nervous system (i.e. fight-or-flight). Whether horror movies also result in release of endorphins, like exercise and masochism, I don't know.
My guess is that in painful exercise, people aren't really deriving pleasure from their pain. Rather, pain is signifying that they are getting closer to their exercise goals, and is linked to feelings of accomplishment. People may derive pleasure from endorphins released during exercise, which would be a similarity with masochism. Furthermore, exercise may involve an altered state of mind, like masochism.
For this point, we do have a name: self-defeating behavior. There may be many motives for self-defeating behavior, such as insecurity, negative self-concept, or desire to be right about beliefs that limit oneself. Although these factors may coexist with masochism in some people, there is no reason to believe that the link is necessary or that they are part of masochism. There is also currently know evidence that self-defeating behavior is linked to certain factors in masochism, such as arousal of the sympathetic nervous system or release of endorphins.
As for masochism itself, it's misleading to describe it as "deriving pleasure from one's own pain." Sensations that non-masochists might experience as pain (or masochists themselves when not aroused), masochists might not experience as pain, but rather as pleasure or stimulation. In The Social Dimension of Sex, Roy Baumester suggests that masochism involves temporary escape from the self (which to me, is plausible as a factor in masochism, but not as a complete explanation). This would be a similarity with exercise, videogames, and perhaps horror movies. However, the particular self-escaping mental state would be different: the flow state) of exercise and videogames is not the same state as subspace. Escaping oneself is different from defeating oneself, which requires a self to defeat.
In Phil's supposedly masochistic pursuits, there are actually a bunch of completely different factors:
Something else to emphasize about masochism is the sexual element, particularly the link to sexual submission (though submissiveness and masochism are not the same thing). In my view, there is something fundamentally different about the psychology of masochists from typical "vanilla" people, and perhaps a biological difference also; that's why I like the description of BDSM interests as a different sexual orientation, or set of sexual orientations. It's problematic to take the psychology of this taxon of people, and generalize from it to the psychological traits of the general population.
Most of Phil's items, including sexual masochism, have some similarities with all other items, and fundamental differences from all the other items. Not all these phenomena are accurately described as deriving pleasure from one's pain, and they can't be fit into the term masochism; doing so will lead to more analytical confusion than clarity.
First, I should say that my objections to Phil's post are not on the grounds of bigotry. Second, I agree with you we should not lose our ability to criticize terrible things due to a politically correct avoidance of "labeling" and necessary categorizations.
Yet the need to morally condemn something shouldn't make us careless about how we categorize it. Like masochism, "sadism" is often used in a non-rigorous way. Enjoying giving someone pain in a safe, sane, and consensual context, is different from the behavior of sexually-motivated serial killers, who do not care about consent and have genuine impulse-control problems. And giving sexually-motivated pain is different from enjoying giving pain out of hatred, experimentation, or political motivations.
In my view, the word sadism should be reserved for when there is a sexual motivation. Otherwise, describing killers and mass-murderers as "sadistic" obscures the many non-sexual motivations behind killing. Although sexually-motivated serial killers are highly cognitively accessible due to the availability heuristic, the "worst thing in the world" (at least in the sense of the body count caused) is probably not sexually motivating killing, but rather political and ideological related killing.