“The psychiatric diagnosis of masochism first formulated in the late Victorian era described people who derive people who derive sexual pleasure from pain. It soon, however, degenerated into a sort of all-purpose definition of the female psyche; so many women got abused because so many women preferred it that way-- an early statement, in some respects, of Robin Norwood’s thesis.
But masochism as a therapeutic diagnosis event all fell into disrepute. As psychoanalyst Karen Horney first pointed in the 1920s. So-called “natural” female masochism was more likely the unnatural product of a sexist social system of rewards and punishments that induced many women to adopt submissive behavior. Horney's Freudian male colleagues didn’t appreciate her observations-- they forced her out of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. But eventually most mental health professionals came around to her point of view, and by the ‘70s, the notion of an innate feminism masochism seemed a quaint relic, more a jocular buzzword than a defensible psychoanalytic theory.
Then in 1985, some psychoanalysts at the American Psychiatric Association decided it was time for masochism to make a come-back, as a “new” disorder in the professional Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, the bible of American psychiatry. This was no arcane matter of classification. The DSM is the standard reference book that mental health professionals rely on to diagnose patients, researchers use to study mental illness, private and public insurers require to determine compensation for therapy, and courts turn to when ruling on insanity pleas and child custody decisions.
That year, Dr. Teresa Bernardez was chairing the APA’s Committee on Women, which is supposed to be consulted on all proposed new DSM diagnoses affecting women. But the APA panel drafting these new diagnoses never bothered to inform her or anyone else on the committee. By happenstance, as the APA was nearing a vote on the diagnosis, Bernardez heard about it from a friend across the country. She investigated further-- and discovered that the APA panel planned to add not one, but three diagnoses affecting women, all in troubling ways.
“Premenstrual dysphoric disorder,” was another one, a diagnosis that revived the long-discredited notion that PMS was a mental illness rather than a simple matter of endocrinology. “Paraphiliac rapism disorder,” was the third, a diagnosis that the APA panel intended to apply to any man (or, theoretically, woman) who reported fantasies about rape or sexual molestation and “repeatedly acts on these urges or is markedly distressed by them.”
If approved, this vague definition could prove a handy insanity plea for any rapist or child molester with an enterprising lawyer. This was obvious enough to the US. Attorney General’s office, which once alerted, even issued an objection.
In some ways, the “masochistic personality disorder” may have been the most regressive, and peculiar, of the three proposed diagnoses. The APA panel had come up with nine characteristics to define masochism-- and they were strangely broad, indeed.
They included anyone who “rejects help, gifts, or favors so as not to be a burden on others,” or “worries excessively” about troubling others or “responds to success or positive events by feeling undeserving.” Included in this list was even the undergraduate who puts aside her homework to help fellow students write their papers. None of the nine characteristics of this new “masochism,” mentioned taking pleasure in pain.
Instead, they described only the self-sacrificing and self-denigrating sort of behavior that is supposed to typify the ideal femininity. The APA panel had neatly summed up female socialization-- and stamped it a private psychiatric malfunction. In fact, the APA panel went even further, dubbing this problem not only a pathological imbalance, but a “personality disorder,” a category of mental illness that psychiatry defines as least related to social conditions and most rooted in the underlying structure of the individual’s personality from early childhood-- and so, most difficult to change. Worst of all, the diagnosis threatened to invite a return to treating battered women as masochists who court domestic violence.
The APA panel included these traits in its definition of the new masochists: “choosing” people who “disappoint” them or “mistreat” them and remaining “in relationships in which others exploit, abuse or take advantage.” The panel illustrated these traits with an example of a masochist who sounded more like the male perspective on the backlash than a description of mental illness: a spouse who criticizes a mate, thus provoking an angry counterattack.”
Once again under the backlash, attention was deflected from the causes of the “counterattack”: male anger over women's increasing demands and male fear over women’s growing autonomy. Once again, each female target of the backlash’s fury was redefined as her, own and only, assailant.
And while the pop psychology books that told women to blame themselves would come and go in bookstores during the ‘80s, the DSM was a permanent fixture. If the APA inscribed this definition of masochism on its pages, it would institutionalize the psychological message of the backlash for years to come.”