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masochism

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masochism

1. Psychiatry an abnormal condition in which pleasure, esp sexual pleasure, is derived from pain or from humiliation, domination, etc., by another person
2. Psychoanal the directing towards oneself of any destructive tendencies
Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

What does it mean when you dream about masochism?

Masochism can represent a desire to punish oneself out of guilt for a crime committed. Physical masochism in a dream can also represent psychological masochism.

The Dream Encyclopedia, Second Edition © 2009 Visible Ink Press®. All rights reserved.

masochism

[′mas·ə‚kiz·əm]
(psychology)
Pleasure derived from experiencing physical or psychological pain.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Masochism

 

a sexual perversion in which an individual cannot reach orgasm unless his sexual partner abuses or humiliates him. Masochism is named after the Austrian writer L. Sacher-Masoch (1836-95), whose novels led the Viennese psychiatrist R. von Krafft-Ebing to diagnose the condition in him.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive
In Fifty Shades, the 'somebody' bigger with whom the shrinking Ana can be seen to masochistically 'fuse' is Grey, the billionaire giant-among-men.
Manufacturers are all too willing -- and maybe, sometimes even masochistically -- to raise the bar, all thanks to users' expectations, which the former takes -- well, should take -- seriously.
For Fromm, these developmental crises may be resolved badly in the form of the individual attempting to sadistically control, objectify, and inanimate objects, others, and knowledge, or masochistically abdicating freedom and agency to a magical helper.
I dream, I close my eyes for a few seconds, I close them violently, masochistically. I go blind.
When USA and China put their economic advantage above everything else, we would be acting masochistically if we did not take advantage of resources generated here at home.
She masochistically hopes to endure their spectacle of cruelty, "to live on fire and not to feel the pain!" (272).
Only when we masochistically envision ourselves as such selves do we feel the need to punish ourselves by quailing before divine commands, or before Kant's tribunal of pure practical reason.
Thus not only could they triumphantly efface the last residual differences between spectacle and the sphere of cultural production that the neo-avant-garde in its more complex postwar figures and moments had still desperately attempted to maintain; they could also extend the legitimation of spectacle's regime deeper into the registers of subject formation, making their audiences masochistically celebrate their own proper subjection to spectacle as the universally valid and incontestable condition of experience.
He is spellbound by the enormities of the screen and of "Africa." He surrenders dangerously, masochistically, to the darkness and to African figures, and through this surrender he achieves some measure of erotic identity.
And seeing that, I couldn't - and can't - help wondering, how and why this country, that could be so rich and prosperous, has managed to bring itself to the brink of ruin - being, so it seems, almost masochistically hooked up with never ending power games.
In recent years, a number of critics have identified a trend within these films in which white male protagonists masochistically submit to extreme forms of bodily abuse.
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