Pain then always can be counted on to stir up excitement, however, pain must be secondary to sexual excitedness. It must be dominated by sexual stimulation. Only when thus dominated can it be expected to enhance sexual excitedness. Psychotics search for unwilling partners. Psychotic criminals torture their victims, inflicting serious and permanent injury, trying to arouse terror in their victims.
Psychotics usually have a past history of sexual crimes such as rape or incest.
This means that far from being a manifestation of a base instinct, sadomasochism required a considerable amount of intelligence and organization. Within the past decade prominent clinicians and scholars in the fields of psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, and clinical sexology, eschewing the received wisdom of past masters who south to fit clinical observations to their theories, rather than the other way around, have instead made serious attempts to understand the activities of consensual sadomasochism as well as the dynamic processes that underlie them, and to devise theories that fit the evidence they found in the lab, in the consulting room, and in the field. But the process of growing up is one of acculturation as well as one of maturation, so that as we are in the midst of discovering all those special attributes that make us who we are, we are simultaneously being trained to subdue, suppress, or otherwise disown important facets of ourselves. In the ensuing confusion, few people grow up whole. Disintegration is the condition that as adults we either accept or try to alter.