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Why Friendship Is Essential to a Good Life

Plato and Aristotle, detail from The School of Athens by Raphael
‘Plato is dear, but dearer still is truth’—a saying that captures Aristotle’s willingness to disagree with his teacher in the pursuit of truth, and his conviction that genuine friendship need never fear honest disagreement.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

We have never had so many ways of connecting with other people, and yet so few close friends.

Many of us have hundreds or even thousands of online contacts, but no one we could call in the middle of the night. We move cities, change jobs, change partners, and change phones without thinking twice, and our friendships often prove just as disposable.

Aristotle would have regarded this not merely as a social problem, but as a human tragedy.

‘Without friends,’ he writes in the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.’

It is a remarkable claim.

Most of us think that, given enough money, success, health, freedom, and comfort, we could muddle along well enough on our own. Aristotle thought otherwise. Friendship is not simply one of life’s pleasures. It is one of its necessities.

Why We Need Friends

The ancient Greeks had several words for love, including eros for passionate or romantic love, and philia (the root of ‘bibliophile’ and ‘anglophile’) for friendship.

For Aristotle, philia is a virtue which is ‘most necessary with a view to living … for without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.’ 

Philia underpins not only personal happiness but the very health of the state. Friendship fosters trust, cooperation, generosity, forbearance, and even justice—for when friendship exists, justice is scarcely needed.

But friendship is not simply for enjoying and getting along. In its highest form, it is a vehicle of virtue, helping us to become better people.

The Three Forms of Friendship

Aristotle begins with a broad or minimal concept of philia. For one person to be friends with another, it is necessary, simply, ‘that [they] bear good will to each other, without this escaping their notice’.

A person may bear goodwill to another for one of three reasons: that they are useful; that they are pleasant; or that they are good—that is, rational and virtuous.

Friendships of utility are based on mutual advantage. We enjoy one another’s company because each has something to offer the other. Such friendships are common in business, politics, and everyday life, and there is nothing wrong with them. But remove the advantage, and they usually disappear.

Friendships of pleasure are based on enjoyment. We like another person’s wit, humour, charm, or shared interests. These friendships are especially common among the young, whose lives are often governed more by feeling than by settled character. They, too, tend to fade as tastes and circumstances change.

The highest form of friendship is based not on usefulness or pleasure, but on virtue. ‘Perfect friendship’, says Aristotle, is ‘the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue.’

Perfect friends are drawn to each other not because they expect anything in return, but because they genuinely admire and value one another’s character. They love their friend not for what he has or provides, but for who he is. 

Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of their nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good—and goodness is an enduring thing … And such a friendship is as might be expected permanent, since there meet in it in all the qualities that friends should have.

Another Self

A perfect friend, says Aristotle, is ‘another self’.

This does not mean someone who merely resembles us or always agrees with us. It means someone who cares enough, or is noble enough, to disagree with us and challenge us.

A true friend shares our deepest values, but also helps us to live up to them. We become better not by admiring virtue from afar, but by practising it together. Friendship is not merely the reward of virtue; it is one of the principal ways in which virtue is cultivated.

Every act of friendship is also an exercise in virtue. In being patient with our friend, we become more patient ourselves. In speaking honestly, we become more honest. In encouraging what is best in another person, we strengthen what is best in ourselves. Our good and their good are no longer competing like fishmongers: each one’s happiness adds to that of the other. We become, in the deepest sense, another self.

We may find an illustration of this ideal in Plato’s Phaedrus. Socrates and Phaedrus spend an afternoon walking in the Attic countryside while reflecting on the soul, love, and the art of persuasion. Their friendship is grounded not merely in pleasure, but in a shared pursuit of truth. At the end of their conversation, Phaedrus responds to Socrates’ prayer with the simple request: ‘Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.’ Whether or not Aristotle had this dialogue in mind, it beautifully embodies his conception of perfect friendship.

Why Friendship Is Rare

Unfortunately, perfect friendship is uncommon.

First, it requires good character, and good character is itself uncommon. Second, it demands something that has always been scarce and may never have been scarcer than today: time.

Friendship cannot be hurried.

People only come to know one another by sharing experiences, surviving disappointments, forgiving offences, and gradually learning that they can be trusted. Like character itself, friendship grows slowly.

We live in a culture that prizes speed, convenience, novelty, and consumer choice. Relationships, like everything else, are expected to fit around our schedules and satisfy our needs. Friendship asks something very different of us. It requires attention, loyalty, respect, forbearance, and sometimes considerable sacrifice.

The Courage to Be Known

There is another difficulty.

Many of us have become so unaccustomed to genuine friendship that, when we encounter its possibility, we instinctively retreat from it.

A true friend is not simply someone who makes us feel better. He knows us. He sees through our pretences. He notices when we deceive ourselves. He quietly expects us to become better than we are.

That can be deeply unsettling.

We often say that we want people to accept us exactly as we are. Aristotle might have replied that a friend accepts us as we are while refusing to leave us there.

Perhaps that is why perfect friendship is so rare. It demands not only affection, but humility; not only loyalty, but the willingness to be changed.

Nowadays, it is all too easy to retreat into comfortable mediocrity.

Friendship and Happiness

Throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that happiness lies not in pleasure or success, but in living according to reason and virtue.

Friendship is one of the principal ways in which this becomes possible.

A good friend encourages what is best in us, restrains what is worst, and accompanies us in the long and difficult work of becoming the person we are capable of being. If we abandon a true friend, really, it is our own self that we are abandoning.

We tend to think of friendship as one of life’s pleasures.

Aristotle thought of it as one of life’s disciplines.

A good friend does not simply make us happier.

He helps us become better and bigger.

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How We Stopped Needing One Another

Three people at a café, looking at their phones

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

We have never been more connected, yet many of our interactions feel strangely empty. Modern life has left us with abundant contact but thinner encounters, as we have become less dependent on—and less attentive to—one another.

We are more connected than any generation in history. We can speak to almost anyone, at almost any time, across almost any distance. Yet all this connection feels strangely empty. We sit in conversations, meetings, and relationships—surrounded by words and faces—and have the quiet sense that nothing is really happening between us.

Not absence.

Presence without encounter.

We have more connection than ever, but less of what makes connection feel alive.

Presence Without Encounter

Loneliness is commonly thought of as “being alone”. But its deeper form has little to do with physical isolation. It is the experience of no longer being met by another mind. That is why loneliness can be at its keenest within relationships, families, and social lives that appear full from the outside. Contact continues, but recognition fades. Conversation carries on, but nothing quite lands.

When this happens, loneliness often does not feel like pain. It feels like flatness. And this is where boredom becomes revealing.

We think of boredom as a lack of stimulation. Yet it often appears in situations where stimulation is plentiful and still nothing meaningful is happening between people. The conversation is pleasant enough. We exchange opinions, anecdotes, updates. Yet nothing surprises us, challenges us, or changes us.

Nothing happens.

Attention, finding nowhere to go, folds back upon itself. What we call boredom in these moments is often social contact that has ceased to feel alive.

Abundant Contact, Thin Encounter

Modern life amplifies this condition. We move through dense networks of people—workplaces, cities, cafés, airports, and digital spaces—where interaction is constant but encounter is fleeting. We know more people than ever, but are deeply engaged with very few.

The result is not isolation.

It is something subtler: abundant contact, but thin encounter.

People cease to become discoveries. They lose weight. We mistake familiarity for knowledge, communication for conversation, and proximity for presence. Social life grows smoother, more efficient, more continuous. And strangely empty.

From this perspective, boredom and loneliness begin to look less like separate problems than different expressions of the same condition. When meaningful contact is absent, we experience loneliness. When contact is plentiful but psychologically empty, we experience boredom. In both cases, what is missing is not company but encounter.

The End of Necessity

Why has this happened? Technology has changed our relationships, but it has not fundamentally changed human nature. The deeper change is that we no longer need one another as we once did.

For most of human history, our lives were interwoven by necessity. Families, neighbours, and communities depended upon one another not merely for companionship but for everyday survival. People met repeatedly, over many years and in many different contexts. They quarrelled, reconciled, forgave, relied upon one another, and could not simply disappear whenever things became uncomfortable.

Dependence demanded attention. We pay close attention to those upon whom our lives depend. We notice their moods because they affect our own. We learn their strengths and weaknesses because they matter to us. Necessity sharpens perception.

Today, much of that necessity has quietly disappeared. We can shop without speaking to anyone, work from home, entertain ourselves alone, and replace awkward conversations with easier ones. Our relationships have become lighter, freer, and more voluntary. This is one of the great achievements of modern society. But every achievement carries a hidden cost.

As our dependence upon one another has diminished, so too has the sustained attention that dependence once demanded. We have become remarkably good at communicating while becoming less practised at encountering—and have grown, almost, to fear genuine encounter.

The Loss of Shared Depth

There is another, quieter shift. Not only have we become less dependent on one another—we also inhabit fewer shared worlds.

For much of history, conversation rested on a relatively common symbolic ground: shared stories, shared texts, shared moral and religious reference points. People could assume that others recognised the same narratives and allusions, and so a single phrase could carry layers of meaning. In that sense, conversation carried implicit depth.

Today, that shared cultural background is thinner and more fragmented. We no longer reliably inhabit the same symbolic world. Our references diverge, our media diverge, our intellectual inheritances diverge. Even when we speak the same language, we often do not share the same implicit meanings.

This does not make people less intelligent or less educated. But it does make encounter more literal. Conversation stays closer to surface experience because there is less shared depth for it to fall into. Where there is no common symbolic ground, there is less space for resonance.

We are not only less necessary to one another. We are less interiorly shared with one another. And so even when we meet, we meet more lightly.

From Aristotle to Buber

This idea is older than it may seem. Aristotle distinguished three kinds of friendship: those grounded in usefulness, pleasure, and virtue. He regarded the last as the highest, since friends united in virtue help one another to live and flourish. Practical need may first bring people together, but in depending upon one another, they may discover deeper reasons to remain together.

More than two thousand years later, Hegel carried the thought further. We become fully ourselves only through recognition by another consciousness. The self is not something we discover alone, but something that emerges in being recognised by another self.

Martin Buber distilled the matter to its essence. Human life is built upon encounter. We become fully human not through information or interaction, but by meeting another person as a Thou rather than an It.

Across these thinkers runs a single intuition: we do not merely live alongside one another. We become ourselves, and our best selves, through one another.

What We Have Forgotten About Connection

Perhaps this is what modernity has quietly eroded. We have not become less social. In many ways, we have become more social than any people in history. But we have become less necessary to one another. Less dependent. Less bonded. Less anchored in common worlds of meaning.

Without necessity, we attend less closely. Without shared depth, we encounter one another more lightly. Without attention, recognition begins to fade. Without recognition, encounter becomes rare. Without encounter, other people cease to surprise us or feel fully alive.

Perhaps the deepest paradox of modernity is not that we have become less connected, but that we have forgotten what connection is. We have confused communication with encounter. Proximity with presence. Contact with recognition.

We have become connected to almost everyone.

And truly encountered by almost no one.

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Getting to the Real Immanuel Kant

A young Immanuel Kant (the Becker portrait)
Without communication, love does not exist; without respect, it does not endure. —Immanuel Kant

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Immanuel Kant is often remembered as the driest of philosophers: austere, methodical, and so punctual that the people of Königsberg supposedly set their clocks by his daily walk. Yet beneath the formidable reputation lay a surprisingly warm and personable man. His greatest transformation came not through philosophy, but through friendship.

In his youth and middle age, the sharply dressed Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) moved in Königsberg’s most refined circles and often stayed out into the small hours. In this period, his student Johann Gottfried Herder described him as ‘the most urbane fellow in the world.’

But when Kant turned forty, he underwent a midlife transformation. He quite literally sobered up, abandoning carefree carousing for the disciplined life of the mind. This profound change owed as much to the early death of a close friend, the dissolute Johann Daniel Funk, as to the making of a new friend, the English merchant Joseph Green, who lived by the clock.

Kant essentially adopted Green’s modus vivendi.

Kant’s Daily Routine, and How It Helped Him

For the rest of his productive life, Kant employed a retired soldier, Martin Lampe, to wake him up at precisely five-to-five every morning. Lampe would stride into his master’s bedroom and cry out, “Herr Professor, the time is come!” Or in German, Herr Professor, es ist Zeit!

Kant worked at his desk in his nightclothes until his lectures began at seven. At eleven, he would change back into nightclothes and return to his desk. The working day effectively ended at one, when he would take lunch in company in a public inn or restaurant. Lunch would end at three with a round of manufactured jokes—in the belief that laughter was good for digestion and broader health.

After lunch, Kant would take his daily constitutional around Königsberg. He walked alone, from fear that outdoor conversation would lead him to breathe through the mouth. He often wound up at Green’s, with whom he liked to discuss Hume and Rousseau. It is said that the housewives of Königsberg would set their timepieces by the time—seven sharp—at which he left Green’s house.

By automating trivial daily decisions, Kant’s rigid daily routine freed his mind to focus purely on philosophy. It’s because of Kant that I have six of the same shirt.

Kant’s Jokes and Philosophy of Laughter

What kind of jokes did Kant tell after lunch? Some of his jokes have come down to us in his writing. For instance: A man tried to arrange a solemn funeral for a rich relative, but failed in the task: ‘The more I paid my mourners, the merrier they looked.’ A merchant sailed back from India with his fortune, but, in a violent storm, had to throw all his cargo overboard. This upset him so much that his wig turned grey overnight.

Laughter, Kant thought, “is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.” The mind is deceived into tensing up, but with the deception revealed suddenly relaxes, leading to laughter, which mimics the motions of the mind and is extremely health-giving. Kant never laughed at his own jokes, but always kept a straight face.

In The Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant quoted Voltaire in saying that Heaven had given us two comforts against life’s hardships, hope and sleep—before suggesting that Voltaire ‘could have added laughter’.

The Death of Joseph Green

In 1786, Joseph Green died, deeply affecting Kant, who thereafter became much more housebound.

After a suitable period of mourning, Kant recruited a female cook and began hosting protracted lunches aimed at stimulating the play of thoughts. To this end, he gathered guests from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, believing that the ideal number of guests lay somewhere between that of the Graces and the Muses (three and nine). All topics great and small were on the table. Philosophy was allowed but not dogmatism, for fear that it would interrupt the convivial flow of ideas.

As well as wine (another of God’s comforts), Kant had a taste for Königsberger Klopse (meatballs in a creamy white sauce with capers), Teltow turnips (an heirloom turnip from the Berlin-Brandenburg region), roast beef, cod, and, as a condiment for the above, English mustard, which he mixed himself in the belief that his special mix protected against senescence.

Kant’s Philosophy of Friendship

Joseph Green was the closest friend that Kant ever had. Green inspired Kant’s routine and became his philosophical sounding board. Kant allegedly discussed every single sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason with Green before publishing it in 1781.

In the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant ended his discussion of character traits just as, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle ended his discussion of the same: with an analysis of friendship.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle made much of the idea of ‘perfect friendship’, which, he thought, is only possible between people of reason and virtue. He famously described a perfect friend as ‘another self’—later paraphrased by Diogenes Laertius as ‘a single soul dwelling in two bodies.’

Kant deemed ‘perfect friendship’ an ideal that in practice cannot be attained. But in striving for it, we might nonetheless arrive at ‘moral friendship’, in which two persons feel able to disclose their secret thoughts and feelings to each other. Moral friendship requires a savant mélange of love and respect, love for bringing two people together, and respect for not driving them apart by infringing upon their dignity and autonomy.

From his own experience, Kant came to believe that most people cannot develop their true character until middle age, when they might undergo a ‘rebirth’. At twenty, we are no more than the product of our upbringing and environment. At thirty, we are still reliant on the judgement and approval of others. Only at forty are we confident enough (or perhaps tired enough) to become who we truly are.

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Kant’s philosophy cannot be fully understood in isolation. The German Greeks places him within the great tradition of German philosophy, from Leibniz through Hegel and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche—revealing how these thinkers transformed the legacy of ancient Greece.

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Finding the Right Distance Between Self and Others

Freud kept a model porcupine on his desk—a reminder of Schopenhauer's famous dilemma. (AI-generated image.)
Freud kept a model porcupine on his desk—a reminder of Schopenhauer’s famous dilemma. (AI-generated image.)

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Schopenhauer compared humans to hedgehogs who huddle for warmth, but in so doing prick one another with their quills.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788, at 114 Heiliggeistgasse in the free city of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland).

Arthur’s father, Heinrich Floris, was one of the city’s most prominent merchants. Heinrich Floris was determined that his only son should become a merchant, and regularly upbraided him for his poor posture and even worse handwriting.

In 1793, when Arthur was five years old, Prussia annexed Danzig. The Schopenhauer family moved to the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg, where Arthur’s sister, Adèle, was born.

Arthur’s French Brother, Jean Anthime

In 1797, the nine-year-old Arthur was sent from Hamburg to Le Havre to live with the family of his father’s business associate, Grégoire de Blésimaire, who had a son, Jean Anthime, of Arthur’s age.

The two years that Arthur spent in Le Havre were, Schopenhauer claimed, among the happiest of his life. He became fluent in French, learned to play the flute, and forged a lifelong friendship with Jean Anthime. As a grown man, Schopenhauer would play the flute every day—leading Nietzsche to wonder whether he was indeed such a pessimist.

From these common beginnings, the lives of Arthur and Jean Anthime would diverge, with Jean Anthime becoming a successful merchant and family man and Arthur growing into a philosopher (‘the Sage of Frankfurt’) and celibate recluse.

The Brothers’ Final Meeting

A lifetime later, in 1845, Jean Anthime travelled to Frankfurt and met his ‘German brother’ for the last time.

In Frankfurt, Schopenhauer took all his meals at the Englischer Hof. He sat alone, dressed in white tie, at a large common table. At every meal, he would place a gold coin on the table. When a waiter enquired into this practice, he replied that he had vowed to himself to give the coin to charity on the first occasion that the other diners discussed something more substantial than ‘horses, women, or dogs’. In thirty years, he never lost his coin.

When Arthur received news of Jean Anthime’s visit, he booked two rooms at the Englischer Hof, one for Jean Anthime and another for Jean Anthime’s daughter by his second marriage.

But Arthur arrived late and in a foul mood to their dinner meeting. In his travel diary, Jean Anthime wrote: ‘He is of such disagreeable character that we quarrelled quite seriously. He professes, he says, the religion of the Hindu. It’s an eccentricity to add to all the others. He is considered mad, and indeed he must be [Il passe pour fou et il doit l’être en effet].’

The Hedgehog Dilemma (or Porcupine Dilemma)

A few years later, in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Schopenhauer would reflect upon the increasing isolation that accompanies old age, positing that the older we become, the more we diverge from others, and the less we need, or think we need, from them.

This is most true of the genius or man of intellect, who finds his own thoughts a lot more interesting and fulfilling than ‘the fuss created by fools’. If we must mingle with fools, we should carry our solitude inside us so as to be ‘not quite in their company, though in their midst’. ‘To be alone’ he wrote, ‘is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.’

Schopenhauer famously compared humans to hedgehogs who huddle for warmth, but in so doing prick one another with their quills. Thus, the hedgehogs need to find just the right degree of closeness between feeling warm and being injured. But in old age, aided by a waning of the Will (the primeval life force in Schopenhauer’s philosophy), we finally have a coat thick enough to keep us warm:

Profound peace of heart and perfect peace of mind, these highest earthly goods after health, are to be found in solitude alone, and, as a permanent disposition, only in the deepest seclusion. And if our own self is great and rich, we enjoy the happiest state that can be found on this miserable earth.

When Freud read Parerga and Paralipomena, he picked up on the hedgehog dilemma and quoted the passage in a footnote to his own 1921 work, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. He used the metaphor to explain the ambivalence of human emotions and the necessity of ‘good manners’ or a ‘proper distance’ in social interactions.

Schopenhauer originally wrote about porcupines, which have longer, more dangerous quills, rather than hedgehogs. Freud was so fond of Schopenhauer’s analogy that, for the rest of his life, he kept a model porcupine on his desk.

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Schopenhauer was the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought. The German Greeks explores his philosophy alongside those of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, tracing the remarkable development of German philosophy from the Enlightenment to modernity.

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A Psychiatrist and Philosopher Attempts to Explain Sadomasochism

Saint Sebastian: martyrdom or ecstasy? Guido Reni, c. 1615.
Saint Sebastian in Ecstasy, by Guido Reni (c. 1615).

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 29 August 2026.

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
I am human, and consider nothing human to be alien to me.
—Terence

Many people think of sadism and masochism merely as perversions. In fact, these tendencies exist on a continuum, and are present, to some degree, in all of us.

Sadomasochism can be defined as the taking of pleasure, often sexual in nature, from the inflicting or suffering of pain, hardship, or humiliation. It can feature as an enhancement to sexual intercourse, or, less commonly, as a substitute or sine qua non.

The infliction of pain or hardship incites pleasure, while the simulation of violence can serve to express and deepen attachment. Indeed, sadomasochistic activities are often instigated at the behest, and for the benefit, of the masochist, who orchestrates the activities through subtle cues.

Consensual sadomasochism should not be confused with simple acts of aggression. While sadomasochists seek out pain in the context of love and sex, they do not do so in other situations, and abhor uninvited aggression or abuse as much as the next person.

Sadomasochistic practices are very diverse, although one study identified four distinct patterns or clusters: hypermasculinity, infliction and reception of pain, physical restriction, and psychological humiliation. Interestingly, the study found that homosexual males tended more to hypermasculinity, whereas heterosexual males tended more to humiliation.

A Brief History of Sadomasochism

‘Sadomasochism’ is a portmanteau of ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’. In Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), a compendium of sexual case histories and sex-crimes, the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who coined the terms, spoke of basic tendencies to sadism in men, and to masochism in women. Modern surveys indicate that sadistic and masochistic desires are common in both men and women, with, however, sadism being commoner in men and masochism commoner in women.

Krafft-Ebing named ‘sadism’ after the Marquis de Sade, author of Justine, or The Misfortune of Virtue (1791); ‘masochism’ he named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs (1870):

Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman’s entire but decisive advantage. Through man’s passions, nature has given man into woman’s hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.

The terms ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ may be of the nineteenth century, but the activities they denote are as old as the rocks. In his Confessions (1782), the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau admits to the pleasure that he derived from childhood beatings, adding that ‘after having ventured to say so much, I can shrink from nothing’. And shrink he did not: ‘To fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon, were for me the most exquisite enjoyments…’ 

In Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, the only Roman novel to survive complete, Fotis slips into her lover’s bedchamber, produces a whip from beneath her clothes, and invites him to punish her.

The Kama Sutra, which probably dates back to the second century, contains an entire chapter devoted to ‘blows and cries’. ‘Sexual relations,’ according to this Hindu sacred text, ‘can be conceived as a kind of combat… For successful intercourse, a show of cruelty is essential.’

The physician JH Meibom formulated the first theory of masochism in his Treatise on the Use of Flogging in Medicine and Venery (1639). According to Meibom, flogging a man’s back warms the semen in the kidneys, which then flows down into the testicles, leading to sexual arousal. Other early theories of masochism centred upon the warming of the blood, or the benefits of sexual arousal in mitigating physical pain.

Krafft-Ebing never connected sadism and masochism, because he understood them as stemming from different sexual and erotic logics. But in Three Papers on Sexual Theory (1905), Freud observed that sadism and masochism often come together (no pun intended). Finally, in 1913, the psychoanalyst Isidor Sadger married the terms.

Freud understood sadism as a distortion of the aggressive component of the male sexual instinct, and masochism as a form of sadism directed against the self—and a graver ‘aberration’ than simple sadism. He remarked that the tendency to inflict and receive pain during intercourse is ‘the most common and important of all perversions’ and ascribed it (as much else) to arrested or disordered psychosexual development. He paid scant attention to sadomasochism in women, either because he thought of sadism as a problem of men, or because he thought of masochism as the natural inclination of women.

In Studies in the Psychology of Sex, the physician Henry Havelock Ellis argued along similar lines that there is no neat divide between sadism and masochism. By restricting sadism and masochism to the sphere of eroticism, he severed their historical link with abuse and cruelty.

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze pushed back against Freud and Havelock Ellis. In his essay Coldness and Cruelty (1967), he contended that sadomasochism is an artificial term, and that sadism and masochism are in fact separate and distinct phenomena. Deleuze provided fresh accounts of sadism and masochism, which, despite being fluent in French, I struggled to comprehend. His point, I think, is that the sadist seeks a victim, whereas the masochist seeks—and in an important sense creates—a despot. For the sadist, a masochist is not a genuine victim.

Sadomasochism Explained

If the experts agree on anything, it is that sadomasochism is one of the great mysteries of the human condition. Here, I propose a number of explanations, none of which are mutually incompatible.

Most obviously, the sadist may derive pleasure from feelings of power, authority, and control, and from the ‘suffering’ of the masochist.

The sadist may also harbour a conscious or unconscious desire to punish or desecrate the object of sexual attraction (or a stand-in for the object of sexual attraction, or for an original object of sexual attraction) for having aroused his desire and thereby subjugated him, or for having frustrated his desire or aroused his jealousy.

Sadism can also serve as a defence. By objectifying a partner, the sadist does not need to handle his or the partner’s emotional baggage, and is able to discount the sex as next to meaningless: a mere act of lust rather than an intimate, vulnerable, and pregnant act of love. The partner becomes a trophy, a mere plaything, and while one can own a toy and knock it about, one cannot fall in love with it or be hurt or betrayed by it.

In some cases, sadism might also represent a species of displacement, in which uncomfortable feelings such as anger, shame, and guilt are discharged onto a third party, who serves as a scapegoat.

For the masochist, taking on a role of subjugation and helplessness can offer a release from stress or the burden of responsibility or guilt. It can also evoke infantile feelings of vulnerability and dependency, which can serve as a proxy for trust and intimacy. Moreover, the masochist may derive gratification from earning the approval of the sadist, fulfilling his fantasies, commanding his undivided attention, and, in that sense, controlling him.

For both the sadist and the masochist, sadistic or masochistic desires may arise through conditioning, if domination or submission becomes associated with sexual arousal.

For the couple as a unit, sadomasochism can be seen as a means of intensifying normal sexual relations (pain releases endorphins and other hormones), leaving a mark or memory, testing boundaries, rebelling against social norms and expectations, giving form and expression to psychological realities, building trust and intimacy, or simply playing.

Sadomasochism in Ordinary Life

And what about you, dear reader? It’s easy to think that this sort of stuff only applies to a handful of ‘deviants’, but the truth is that we all harbour sadomasochistic tendencies. Just think, for example, of casual, ‘normal’ behaviours such as love-biting, tickling, or teasing.

Sadomasochism can also play out on a psychological level. In every relationship or almost, one partner is more attached or dependent than the other. Characteristically, the more attached partner is ‘the one who waits’.

Thus, the philosopher Roland Barthes (d. 1980):

Am I in love? —yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits. (L’identité fatale de l’amoureux n’est rien d’autre que: je suis celui qui attend.)

The likely outcome of this asymmetry of desire is that the less attached partner (A) becomes dominant, while the more attached partner (B) becomes submissive in a bid to please and seduce. Sooner or later, A feels stifled and takes distance, but if he or she ventures too far, B may threaten to go cold or give up. This in turn prompts A to flip and, for a time, to become the more enthusiastic of the pair. But the original dynamic soon re-establishes itself, until it is once again upset, and so on ad vitam æternam.

Domination and submission are elements of every relationship or almost, but that does not mean that they are not tedious, sterile, and, to echo Freud, immature. Instead of playing at cat and mouse, lovers need to be able to rise above that game, and not just by getting married. By learning to trust each other, they can dare to see each other as the fully-fledged human beings that they truly are, ends-in-themselves rather than mere means-to-an-end.

True love is about respecting, nurturing, and enabling—whatever else may happen on a Sunday—but how many people have the capacity and maturity for this kind of love?

And, of course, it takes two not to tango.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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