How Sadism and Masochism Got Their Names

Every other subculture names itself. This one was named by a psychiatrist, from two dead and dying novelists, for the convenience of a courtroom. That accident of history is still doing work in how these practices get talked about, described and judged.

One name arrived by itself, the other was assigned

The two words did not enter the language the same way, and the difference is usually collapsed.

Sadisme was already French. The Marquis de Sade died in 1814, his books banned and his authorship publicly denied by his own family, and the name detached from the man and went into general circulation as a byword for cruelty. Lexicographers were entering it in the 1830s. By the time medicine reached for the word it was picking up something the reading public had made and worn in.

Masochism has a date and an author. Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined it in Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886, taking it from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who was fifty and still publishing. There was no French precedent, no popular usage, nothing but a book called Venus in Furs from 1870 and a physician who needed a label. Sacher-Masoch lived another nine years underneath it.

Freud made them a pair

The compound came next. Sigmund Freud, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905, treated sadism and masochism as two faces of a single thing, a drive that could turn outward or inward and often did both in the same person. That pairing became orthodoxy, and it is the reason the hyphenated word exists at all. Nothing in the two novelists required it.

The most useful objection came much later. In a study of Sacher-Masoch published in 1967, Gilles Deleuze argued the pairing was a category error: that Sade’s world runs on institutions, demonstration and negation, while Sacher-Masoch’s runs on contracts, suspense and delay, and that the two describe incompatible arrangements which the compound word hides. Accepting his whole reading is optional. Noticing the point is not. Sadomasochism is an artefact of who happened to get named in 1886, not a description of how the practices actually divide.

From diagnosis to identity

Clinical words rarely stay clinical. Through the second half of the twentieth century the terms were picked up by the people they had been aimed at, shortened, and worn deliberately: S and M as self-description, in personal ads, club names and community publications, carrying an edge of defiance that a diagnosis cannot.

Then came the acronym. BDSM stacks three pairs into four letters, bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism, and it is usually dated to the early 1990s and to the online groups where the subculture had moved. Who typed it first is not settled. What makes it worth marking on the timeline is not its origin but its authorship: for the first time in this history, the community named itself.

What a name costs

When a person’s surname becomes a diagnosis, the person goes missing. Sacher-Masoch wrote Galician village stories, historical fiction and a great deal of journalism, almost none of which is read now. Sade spent roughly three decades locked up, much of it without a criminal sentence, and his politics were considerably more complicated than the adjective allows. Both survive mainly as evidence for categories they did not choose and could not refuse.

There is a second cost, and it is the one still being paid. These words were built to describe pathology. Sadism, as Krafft-Ebing defined it, carries harm inside the definition; nothing in the clinical term makes room for something wanted, negotiated and stopped on request. The subculture has spent decades bolting qualifiers onto that inheritance, consensual, safe, sane, risk-aware, informed, precisely because the base vocabulary was designed to describe something else entirely.

The two words also drifted apart in general English. Sadism escaped into ordinary moral speech, applied to teachers, regimes and bureaucracies, always as an accusation. Masochism stayed nearer its origin and picked up a mild figurative use, the kind applied to someone who supports a losing team. One of the pair became a charge, the other a joke, and neither now means what a courtroom in 1886 meant by it.

For the century that produced both words, see the 1800s. For what happened when a court had to decide what the practices behind them legally amounted to, see Operation Spanner.