The Penumbral Theory of Masochistic Pleasure

Abstract

Being whipped, getting a deep-tissue massage, eating hot chili peppers, running marathons, and getting tattooed are all painful. Sometimes they are also pleasant-or so many people claim. Masochistic pleasure consists in finding such experiences pleasant in addition to, and because of, the pain. Masochistic pleasure presents a philosophical puzzle. Pains hurt, they feel bad, and are aversive. Pleasures do the opposite. Thus many assume that the idea of a pleasant pain is downright unintelligible. I disagree. I claim that cases of pleasant pains are more common than many philosophers suppose, and that they have no essential connection to either sex or psychopathology. I review several attempts to account for masochism that preserve the intuition that nothing can be both pleasant and painful at once. These account for some, but not all, cases of masochism. The stubborn remainder, I argue, are sensations that are genuinely pleasant and painful at once. I give an account of how that might be, focusing on boundary-pushing aspects of masochistic pleasure that have been largely overlooked in the literature. I show how, properly understood, pain and pleasure can coexist-and also why it is very rare for them to actually do so.

Art and painful emotion

“…Colin Klein () advances a strong hedonic ambivalence view in his paper “The Penumbral Theory of Masochistic Pleasure.” Klein's view is that pains can make a positive hedonic contribution in cases where they approach the limits of what we can tolerate. This account does not help with cases where an easily tolerated negative emotion makes a positive contribution (as moderate fear does when an early chapter in a novel foreshadows an ominous event), but it might be an apt account of a limited range of cases.…”

Finding the Good in Grief: What Augustine Knew that Meursault Could Not

“…How this combination of attitudes or sensations is possible has long puzzled philosophers. (For a recent account, see Klein 2014.) It seems unlikely, though, that grief is a species of masochism.…”

Feeling hurt: advances in the social psychology of pain

“…When combined however, pain and pleasure elicit a vexed philosophical and moral quandary (Baumeister, 1988(Baumeister, , 1989(Baumeister, /2014. Even though pain enjoyment can be observed in normative and non-sexual settings (Ferris, Jetten, & Bastian, manuscript in preparation;Klein, 2014;Rozin et al, 2013), historically, pain enjoyment has attracted moral condemnation and has been described as deviant, perverse, or pathological (Brenner, 1959;Freud, 1929). In the present work we examine the perceived morality of pain enjoyment.…”

“…In describing the phenomenon of 'benign masochism', Rozin et al (2013) identified a range of normative exemplars of aversive and negatively-valenced experiences from which pleasure can arise, such as enjoying sad or scary movies, or imbibing bitter, sour or astringent food and drink. Similarly, there is evidence of pain enjoyment in the context of sport and other physical challenges (Bridel, 2010;Gard & Meyenn, 2000); childbirth (Norr, Block, Charles, Meyering, & Meyers, 1977); and 'aggressive victuals' such as chilli-eating (Klein, 2014;Rozin, Gruss, & Berk, 1979;Rozin & Schiller, 1980). Pleasurable pain also attends some extreme devotional or religious activities, such as ecstatic devotion or possession (Glucklich, 2003), in which painful activities such as flagellation are undertaken to ostensibly induce a state of elevation in which participants feel spiritual connection to their deity.…”

“…Due to the brevity of our measurement techniques however, there is low resolution in terms of the content of the 'self-revelation' construct. Fleshing out this psychological construct will allow us to understand what precisely was being revealed and to what end -was it revelation of penumbral psychological or bodily mastery (as suggested by Fredrickson, 2000;Klein, 2014;Rozin et al, 2013); or authenticity, vulnerability, or values (Rossano, 2012;Watson-Jones & Legare, 2016)? The content of these revelations cannot be determined with the present data.…”