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What is the affiliation of sadomasochism to flagellation?
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During the Middle Ages, various ascetic sects within the Mediterranean and Hibernian world adopted the practice of flagellation; ritua…l scourging of the flesh with a whip for the purpose of cleansing the soul of sin. Among Christian religious communities, where flagellation was most systematically integrated into devotional life, flagellation was performed as a memorial to an act of sacrifice that occurred centuries in the past, the suffering and martyrdom of Jesus Christ. Personal acts of self-immolation by monks, nuns, and other holy people imitated biblical descriptions of Christ's journey to Calvary for crucifixion, the primordial moment of Christian sacrifice, when life beyond the grave was supposed to have been achieved. Mimetic flagellation was done in the belief that bodily suffering atoned for offenses against God and satisfied divine justice. Penitential obligations imposed by the church hierarchy over the lay population extended the practice of remunerative suffering in the high Middle Ages. Flagellation of a voluntary nature was appropriated soon thereafter by lay members of society in Italy, Greece, Germany, and Poland. During the fourteenth century, public processions of ritual scourging were formed with the intention of appeasing God's wrath in order to secure communal health against the bubonic plague. At a slightly later date, towards the end of the fifteenth century, voluntary scourging became public in Spain, where it took on its most elaborate and ceremonial forms. Young men who called themselves disciplinantes , the flagellators, organized into religious brotherhoods for the specific purpose of scourging the flesh 'in payment for all the sins of the Christian people'. These collective orders of storytellers reproduced during Holy Week the mournful scriptural saga of redemption by inscribing on their backs the blood that was thought once to have been shed by Christ. The men who chose to participate in the annual performances of penitence initially met together in private in parish churches and local monasteries, to contemplate Christ's suffering and share in evening meals. They extended to one another signs of affection and goodwill and offered apologies for past offences. Wedded in a state of grace and freed of animosity, they silently journeyed out on to dirt and cobblestone streets, walking barefoot through narrow corridors of urban and rural thoroughfares for distances of some two to five leagues. On the way they scourged themselves, flailing long, knotted and wax-tipped ropes across their backs until blood drenched their linen tunics and spilled over on to darkened pavements. As much as a pound of coagulated blood was noted to have been shed by individual flagellants during these paschal ceremonies. It was because of the physical strength and endurance required to perform in front of the public with unwavering resolve that corporate legislation required that flagellation only be performed by men under the age of fifty in good health. The flagellants' re-enactment of Christ's sacrifice, in processions that riddled the surface of public streets with the blood of inhabitants, exposes for us a dual meaning to bodily ritual in the religious observances of traditional communities. Ritual is a means first and foremost, as Mircea Eliade has demonstrated forcefully in The Sacred and the Profane , of spanning the chronological distance between present and past and perpetuating memories of a people's supernatural origins. The theological message of ritual scourging was made clear to spectators in formal pronouncements. As young men solemnly raised lashes over their heads, public oracles announced that 'this is done in honor and reverence of the shedding of His precious blood, and in honor of the five thousand lashes that they gave Him in order to redeem and save us'..
Along with this commemorative function, a second, more immediate and personal meaning was expressed in these ceremonial acts. Suffering and affliction experienced by all who followed Christ, it was collectively articulated, had the continued power to cleanse, to heal, and to restore moral order. This was why Holy Week exercises did not merely recall, in an abstract manner, an act of sanctifying pain that had occurred once already in the past, but actively emulated this sanctification process in the present..
Through the experience of genuine pain, penitents were laying claim to their immediate sense of control over morality and collective justice. Flagellants were rehearsing a past that continued to live on in their emotional appreciation of the world, causing their own blood to mingle with that of Christ's memory to bring down upon the community divine grace..
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Sadism and http://wiki.answers.com/topic/masochism represent contrasting forms of pleasure derived from sexual excitation linked to http://wiki.answers.com/topic/cruelty and the infliction of pain. While both currents are present in any given individual, they also represent pregenital links in an intersubjective context in which one partner is the sadist and the other the masochist. Sadomasochism may have an oral component but takes on characteristic form during the anal http://wiki.answers.com/topic/sadism stage..
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), Freud pointed out that sadism and masochism, terms that first gained currency in the work of Richard Krafft-Ebing, "are habitually found together in the same individual" and "occur together regularly as pairs of opposites" (pp. 159-60). Freud eventually generalized this dynamic to psychic structures as a whole, when he posited the relations governing the mental agencies in his second http://wiki.answers.com/topic/topography . Thus the http://wiki.answers.com/topic/ego-superego-and-id 's sadism toward the ego figures prominently in the idea of self-punishment and http://wiki.answers.com/topic/moral-masochism . Sadomasochism may also characterize relationships between individuals, regardless of gender, and even if the context is a normal sexual relationship..
Sadomasochism may be viewed as a http://wiki.answers.com/topic/regression in the face of http://wiki.answers.com/topic/castration-complex , provoked by the http://wiki.answers.com/topic/oedipal conflict and associated with the perception of the anatomical differences between the sexes. This interplay can be seen in cases of obsessional neurosis-for example, with the "Rat Man" in "Notes upon a Case of http://wiki.answers.com/topic/obsessional-neurosis " (1909d). Freud also found sadomasochistic aspects to the oedipally tinged auto-erotic fantasies discussed in "A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions" (1919e). In general, Freud's original conception of sadomasochism developed from his early http://wiki.answers.com/topic/instinct theory, which included a drive to http://wiki.answers.com/topic/mastery without a sexual aim..
However, in terms of the genesis of the sadism and masochism, Freud eventually gave pride of place to the latter, which he discussed first in 1915 in " http://wiki.answers.com/topic/instincts-and-their-vicissitudes " in terms of the presence of sexual excitation, and then formulated more generally in "The Economic Problem of Masochism" (1924c), written after the introduction of the http://wiki.answers.com/topic/death-instinct ..
In Freud's later theory, sadomasochism derives its importance and power, so to speak, from a singularly effective form of instinctual fusion that protects the individual from the death instinct by http://wiki.answers.com/topic/diverting it outward (sadism) or binding it either internally or to an object (masochism). This amounts to a profound explanation of the human capacity to hurt http://wiki.answers.com/topic/oneself and one another, with both sexual and survival benefits. This idea can http://wiki.answers.com/topic/elicit at least as much if not more resistance than http://wiki.answers.com/topic/infantile-sexuality . In dealing with sadomasochism, the analyst may confront resistances that are especially rigid, together with fixations on pregenital object relations, moral masochism, and negative therapeutic reaction..
Freud's conception of sadomasochism can be clinically validated by role reversal found among sadomasochistic couples, in the establishment of reverse relationships with another partner, and in the special durability of such relationships. The masochist's victory lies in the fact that the master cannot free him- or herself from the ties that bind..
For analysts who remained faithful to Freud's first theory of instincts, sadomasochism expresses mental destructiveness, sometimes in the most extreme fashion. For those who preferred the death instinct, sadomasochism instead offers protection from instinctual destructiveness, both internally and through http://wiki.answers.com/topic/cathexis of a particularly solid object relationship, albeit a pregenital one. Both camps are in agreement in referring to sadomasochism clinically in the analysis of http://wiki.answers.com/topic/borderline or http://wiki.answers.com/topic/narcissism situations in which http://wiki.answers.com/topic/triangulation gives way to http://wiki.answers.com/topic/dyadic relations, but they view it differently, as either negative or positive, with regard to destructiveness. This difference would tend to dissolve if it were specified whether internal destructiveness or external destructiveness was involved, because only the latter is taken into account in terms of aggression..
Bibliography.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE , 7: 123-243..
--. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE , 14: 109-140..
--. (1919e). A child is being beaten: A contribution to the study of the origin of http://wiki.answers.com/topic/paraphilia . SE , 17: 175-204..
--. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE , 19: 155-170..
-DENYS RIBAS .
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