On the Twisted Structure of Sado-Masochismin Lacan’s Anxiety Seminar

As early as his Three Essays, Freud accounted for sadism and masochism in terms of two, mirrored (or dialectically opposed) articulations of the selfsame aggressive drives. More recently, attention has been drawn to various elements at work in the two perversions that fail to fit within Freud’s dialectical model. Gilles Deleuze, for example, has criticized Freud’s conception of sadomasochism as an artificial clinical entity and has insisted upon introducing a strict dissociation between the two perversions.…