Fantasizing One’s Debasement

In his 1919 essay “A Child Is Being Beaten,” Freud relates a frequent and disturbing fantasy common among his patients. An alarming number of them fantasize that a child is being beaten. “It is surprising,” Freud writes, “how often people who seek analytic treatment for hysteria or an obsessional neurosis confess to having indulged in the phantasy: ‘A child is being beaten.’ Very probably there are still more frequent instances of it among the far greater number of people who have not been obliged to come to analysis by manifest illness.”1 As is common in Freud’s theory, the etiology of the fantasy is not what we might think. The patients in question had not been beaten as children, though they all encountered such violence later in life. His patients, it seems, fantasized at an early age about a scene of inexplicable violence in which an unidentified child suffers at the hand of an unidentified adult. The encounter with similar violence later in life, such as a school beating, had the curious effect not of implanting the fantasy but of reactivating it after a long period of dormancy. Freud remarks, “The influence of the school [where the patient saw other children being beaten by the teacher] was so clear that the patients concerned were at first tempted to trace back their beating-phantasies exclusively to these impressions of school life.” “But,” Freud observes, “it was never possible for them to maintain that position; the phantasies had already been in existence before.”2 The trauma of witnessing the school beating worked in reverse: the second event reactivated that which came before it, awakening the preexisting fantasy.

What stands out about Freud’s essay is that it posits an exception to the rule of the pleasure principle, which maintains that we are all driven by the unconscious urge to release tension. The fantasy of a child being beaten upends this tension-release system. It is not only upsetting, but, as Freud will discover, it is also exciting and enjoyable to the patient who suffers it. “This phantasy—‘a child is being beaten’—was invariably cathected with a high degree of pleasure and had its issue in an act of pleasurable auto-erotic satisfaction.”3 The fantasy suggests to Freud that we are not ruled by pleasure at all; instead, the fantasy forces Freud to think that beyond pleasure there is a preexisting foundation of masochistic enjoyment intolerable to conscious thought. In time, Freud will elevate the exceptional fantasy to the rule of human psychic organization. Although the content of the fantasy varies wildly from person to person, the masochistic form remains a constant in psychic life. Freud’s breakthrough claim just a year later, that we are all driven to undermine ourselves and do so repeatedly (this is Freud’s theory of the death drive), can be traced back to his patients’ fantasy that a child is being beaten, a passive voice construction so indirect that it could be a New York Times headline, where the agent is missing, and the object of the beating is somehow beating himself.

There are three layers to the fantasy that Freud slowly and painstakingly separates through analysis. The first and third phases of the fantasy maintain the anonymity of the child and adult. Freud comments, “The actual identity of the person who does the beating remains obscure at first. Only this much can be established: it is not a child but an adult. Later on this indeterminate grown-up person becomes recognizable clearly and unambiguously as the (girl’s) father.”4 Freud hesitates to label the first layer of the fantasy sadistic—“In these circumstances it was impossible at first even to decide whether the pleasure attaching to the beating-phantasy was to be described as sadistic or masochistic”—but eventually he settles on that description, rewriting the fantasy as, “My father is beating the child whom I hate.”5

The second phase of the fantasy, which Freud deems the most important, changes the dynamic. He writes,

Profound transformations have taken place between this first phase [“a child is being beaten”] and the next. It is true that the person beating remains the same (that is, the father); but the child who is beaten has been changed into another one and is now invariably the child producing the phantasy. The phantasy is accompanied by a high degree of pleasure, and has now acquired a significant content. . . . Now, therefore, the wording runs: “I am being beaten by my father.” It is of an unmistakably masochistic character.6

In the second version of the fantasy, the child receiving the beating is the person having the fantasy. Moreover, the doer is no longer obscured by the passive voice. The doer in the second version is the child’s father. In this second layer of the fantasy, reconstructed through analysis, “A child is being beaten” becomes “I am being beaten by my father.” Herein lies the radicality of Freud’s essay. The one fantasizing about the abuse does not initially see themselves in the picture; the realization that the patient is the child and that they are being beaten comes later through analysis. As Jamieson Webster writes, “the analyst, in constructing the second layer for the patient, returns a more active ‘I’ to them, for in the other scenes the person is usually a voyeur, watching things from the sidelines.”7 Webster describes the beating fantasy “as a kind of daydream or mind-movie”: “It is almost as if this masturbatory scene were a film silently running in the background of life.”8 We shall see throughout this book how certain films replay the masochistic fantasy that Freud uncovers, as if, as Webster suggests, they are working through the same collective daydream. The cinematic examples externalize the beating fantasy and position the viewer in both phases of the “mind-movie,” the voyeur and the object of the beating. They repeat the masochistic structure “silently running in the background of life,” daring us to consider the radicality of the masochistic form and the reason for its persistence.

Freud notes, “This second phase,” in which the voyeur recognizes herself in the picture as the child being beaten, “is the most important and the most momentous of all.”9 There must be a willingness on the part of the patient to see themselves in the image they observe, at first, voyeuristically. But there is also a great deal of psychic resistance to such an identification, of seeing oneself not only as the injured party but as the one fantasizing one’s own debasement. Freud cautions, “We may say of it in a certain sense that it has never had a real existence. It is never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account.”10 The masochistic phase “has never succeeded in becoming conscious.” Only through analysis, including the analysis of film, can the masochistic structure, which is resisted by consciousness, come to light.

The same is not true of sadism. While “it is only with hesitation that this [the sadistic] phantasy is confessed to,” and “its first appearance is recollected with uncertainty,” “shame,” and “guilt,” the sadistic layer of the fantasy is not impossible to recall outside of analysis.11 The accessibility of sadism owes to the difference in its structure compared to masochism. Whereas masochistic enjoyment does not require an outsider whom it excludes or makes small (as a masochist, I easily undermine myself without assistance), sadistic enjoyment requires someone to punish or exclude. Sadistic enjoyment is parasitic. It is also conservative, aligning sadism with the conservatism of the ego. The two go hand in hand. We could say that sadism is secondary to masochism, which Freud sees as primary in our psychic constitution. Sadistic enjoyment must exclude primary masochism in order to enjoy because the purpose of masochism is self-destruction. The former, sadism, aids the latter’s repression.

The father figure in Freud’s patients’ fantasies is sadistic, as are the authorities in their real-life, trauma-inducing episodes. These figures inflict violence rather than undermine their own authority. They cannot identify with the injured or the vulnerable, as in the second layer of the beating fantasy. To do so would be to transgress the structure of their enjoyment, which depends on debasing someone else. None of Freud’s patients identify with the sadistic figure, the father, or the authorities. Moreover, none of the real or imaginary authorities identify with the individuals they are harming. It wouldn’t be impossible. But it would require a radical transformation of their means of enjoyment.

This book theorizes that transformation. It examines Freud’s theory of masochism in light of the student protests calling for an end to the US-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians.12 Its title, Divest, derives from the pro-Palestinian chant, “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,” which, in 2024, became a rallying cry for student protestors demanding that their colleges and universities divest from the corporations profiting from genocide.

Freud may be an unlikely ally in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement working to end international support for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.13 Yet, in theorizing divestment as a universal masochistic structure, one that divests from the conservatism of the ego and, by extension, the conservatism of our sadistic, warmongering, increasingly fascistic world, Freud theorizes, I contend, a radical form of divestment not only from corporate greed but also from the social and psychic forces that make sadists of us all and prevent us from seeing ourselves, like Freud’s patients, in the picture, in the objects we observe, in the suffering, injustice, and generalized violence of our capitalistic world. The masochistic structure, which Freud says must be constructed, enables subjects to see themselves in the everyday barbarity flashing on our screens, no longer as voyeurs but as the objects of the fantasy “a child is being beaten,” which today recurs globally as so many collective traumas, repeating without stop: “a Palestinian is being beaten,” “an environmental activist is being beaten,” “an unhoused person is being beaten,” “a student is being beaten.”

I want to stress at the outset that I do not intend to reduce real-life violence to a fantasy, nor am I suggesting an equivalence between those who observe violence and those who suffer it firsthand. Instead, I am suggesting that the sadistic violence happening all around us, 24/7 is a reaction formation, a way of repressing the masochistic structure that Freud claims is prior to anything in our psychic organization. Masochism is both universal—“a film silently running in the background of life”—and universally disowned. Masochism disturbs our claims to self-sovereignty, splinters our self-image, makes accumulation unappealing and power a sexual turnoff, and confuses the opposition between self and other. Freud’s masochistic patients see themselves in the image of the other; they suffer in kind. I am not advocating for the mutual recognition of two consciousnesses or some kind of anodyne sentimentalism. I am advocating for the libidinally charged self-destruction that misaligns subjects, undoes their self-serving sentimentalism, and, according to Freud, enables them to divest from the sadistic fantasies that prohibit their masochistic calling. Investing in masochism is, I propose, an essential step toward broad-scale divestment from the social and libidinal forces that convert masochistic subjects into liberal, capitalist subjects, unable or unwilling to see themselves in the picture, not as monads but as comrades in collective struggle. Freud’s lesson is this: Whatever erotic stimulus we derive from sadism, it is second to and derivative of the self-destructive thrill of masochism. The politics of masochism is supercharged with enjoyment.

Recent psychoanalytic and psychoanalytically informed accounts of sadism obscure the masochistic structure at work in emancipatory politics. I articulate Freud’s revision of his original theory of masochism, which he defines as sadism turned inward, and focus on the radicality of his mature theory, which makes masochism primary. In “A Child Is Being Beaten,” Freud maintains the original hypothesis that masochism is sadism turned inward, which gives priority to sadism. Freud writes, “In this way the phantasy of the second phase, that of being beaten by her father, is a direct expression of the girl’s sense of guilt, to which her love for her father has now succumbed. The phantasy, therefore, has become masochistic.”14 He adds: “So far as I know, this is always so; a sense of guilt is invariably the factor that transforms sadism into masochism.”15

In the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud reverses course. Sadism, Freud eventually comes to see, is masochism turned outward. “We call it sadism when sexual satisfaction is linked to the condition of the sexual object’s suffering pain, ill-treatment and humiliation, and masochism when the need is felt of being the ill-treated object oneself. . . . We are led to the view that masochism is older than sadism, and that sadism is the destructive instinct directed outwards, thus acquiring the characteristic of aggressiveness.”16 This change in direction, putting masochism first in the psychic organization, constitutes a revolution in Freud’s thought. It also holds the key to conceptualizing the sadistic politics of the state and university, which used the police to strong-arm students and, conversely, the masochistic politics underwriting the left-wing, pro-Palestinian movement. My claim is that masochism is integral to left-wing solidarity and that part of what we are seeing unfolding on the streets, in the university, and globally is the opposition between two forms of enjoyment: the masochistic embrace of one’s self-undermining and the sadistic reaction against it.