Name: Are you a Sadist or a Masochist - and Why?
Uploaded: 2025-07-29T17:58:35.000Z
Duration: 3 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Two of the strangest but most powerful concepts in psychology are called variously sadism and masochism.

By sadism is understood an enjoyment in causing other people suffering, and by masochism an enjoyment in receiving ill-treatment from others.

Though commonly associated with sexual scenarios, these drives operate in all areas of life, at the office or in the schoolyard as much as in the bedroom or the dungeon.

Why do we seem to delight in inflicting suffering or, even more strangely, take satisfaction in enduring it?

The best way to understand the phenomena is to view them as attempts to deal with an earlier, intolerable experience of fear, cruelty or unkindness.

Before anyone winds up either a reflection of the mind's concerted attempts to find a way out of a naked encounter with pain.

Masochists and sadists are both trying to ensure that they will survive what once felt like it might annihilate them.

The sadist hits on the more straightforward move.

Having received cruelty, they conclude that the best way to escape its shadow is to be cruel to somebody else.

The former terrified child becomes a terrifying adult.

Implicitly, the sadist believes that there are only two roles available, victim or perpetrator, and that their best chances of never again ending up as the former is to ensure that they will always be the latter.

Masochists have, like sadists, also been the victims of cruelty.

Like sadists, they are also in flight from defenselessness.

But their method of adaptation is more roundabout.

A sense of weakness, real or imagined, holds them back from attempts to persecute other people.

And yet they still need some psychological way of alleviating the memory of suffering.

And so they hit upon what could almost be labelled an ingenious idea.

They decide that they will henceforth choose suffering rather than having it forced upon them.

They opt to turn a necessity into something akin to a choice.

Once they had no option but to be bullied by their family of birth, now they go out in active search of mean-minded partners whom they can unconsciously tell will deny them tenderness and care.

Once they were told by others that were a failure, now they ruin their own chances before anyone else has the opportunity to do it for them.

To liberate ourselves, we need to find our way back to the pain that lies behind our behaviours.

And then we should do something that we have until now avoided.

We should cry for what we have had to not ask anyone else, it might be a stranger or as regrettably ourselves, to suffer any further.