Treatment of the masochistic personality

To love repeatedly in an unsatisfying and self-destructive way cripples many people. The dynamics that underlie this painful way of relating often escape clinical attention, and people with subtle yet pervasive masochistic problems may endure painful relationships without seeking treatment. In Treatment of the Masochistic Personality: An Interactional-Object Relations Approach to Psychotherapy, Cheryl Glickauf-Hughes and Marolyn Wells use contemporary psychoanalytic thinking to probe the functions of masochism underlying human interaction - particularly love relations. From a relational perspective, masochism is not associated with that which is feminine and signifies neither a primarily sexual phenomenon nor the deriving of pleasure from pain. Rather, masochism is viewed as a self-defeating way of loving and individuating that reflects a pathology of object relations. According to Glickauf-Hughes and Wells, pathological loving can include any of the following dynamics: loving someone who predominantly gives no love in return, confusing self-negation and suffering with love, protecting the idealized image of an unsatisfying love object and choosing critical and rejecting love objects in the never-ending hope of gaining their approval through self-sacrifice. The authors propose an object relations approach to psychotherapy with the masochistic personality. In treatment, insight into unconscious conflict is complemented by opportunities for the patient to experience the therapist as a new object offering new possibilities for growth. Patients are offered the opportunity for a corrective interpersonal experience, geared to helping them master unresolved developmental issues and developing more appropriate and satisfying interpersonal relationships.