What is going on here? In trying to understand what has happened, the therapist recalls the obvious relish with which the woman had recounted the long history of her husband’s brutality and mistreatment. Suddenly a strange idea begins to dawn; maybe this woman endures her husband’s mistreatment, and even seeks it out, for the very pleasure of talki

Masochism, however, is the enjoyment of pain for its own sake, while we are talking about the transmutation of pain, physical or mental, into vital energy.