Few psychological phenomena challenge our assumptions about human nature as provocatively as masochism. We are wired to avoid pain it is one of the body’s most fundamental survival signalsย yet a significant portion of the population finds ways to experience it as something entirely different: pleasurable, cathartic, even transcendent. Far from being a simple curiosity or a clinical aberration, masochism turns out to be a window into the extraordinary flexibility of the human mind.
A Term Born from Literature
The word itself traces back not to a laboratory but to a drawing room. In 1883, German neurologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing was searching for a name to describe patients who experienced pleasure through submission and suffering. He turned to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian nobleman whose 1869 novella Venus in Furs had caused considerable stir across Europe. The story’s protagonist voluntarily enslaves himself to a woman he loves, inviting progressively humiliating treatment an arrangement that mirrored Sacher-Masoch’s own private life, including a contractual six-month servitude to his mistress.
Krafft-Ebing catalogued masochism in his landmark work Psychopathia Sexualis as a form of psychopathology ย a perversion rooted in the surrender of will to another. Freud later widened the frame, linking masochism and sadism as mirror tendencies arising from early psychological development, each containing the seed of the other. These were influential ideas, but they cast a long shadow of pathology over experiences that, for many people, are simply part of a rich inner life.
When Pain Stops Being a Warning
Modern neuroscience offers a more generous and far more interesting explanation. Pain is not a monolithic experience. Its meaning ย and therefore its emotional character changes dramatically depending on context. Stubbing a toe in the dark registers as a threat, triggering alarm and distress. Pain experienced voluntarily, in a safe and consensual setting, travels through the same neural architecture but arrives at a completely different destination.
Research by Cara Dunkley and colleagues at the University of British Columbia describes this as “top-down processing” the brain interpreting incoming sensory data through the filter of expectation, memory, and meaning. When a person has consented to an intense physical experience and trusts their environment, the brain shifts gears. Rather than sounding alarms, it begins releasing endogenous opioids and endocannabinoids the same neurochemicals responsible for the euphoria runners feel at mile twelve. Pain becomes the trigger for a biochemical reward. The sharper edges of the sensation are blunted, and what remains can feel expansive, even ecstatic.
Sexual arousal adds another layer. Studies have consistently shown that arousal raises the threshold for pain tolerance considerably. The brain, preoccupied with pleasure, suppresses the aversive quality of physical sensation. Pain doesn’t disappear it intensifies but its emotional valence flips.
The Mind’s Escape Hatch
There is also something more subtle happening at the psychological level. Practitioners of BDSM often describe entering a state known as “subspace” a deep, trance-like condition characterized by floating sensations, mental quietude, and a dissolving of ordinary self-consciousness. Researchers have compared this to the flow state athletes and artists describe, or the stillness achieved through advanced meditation.
The mechanism appears to involve what neurologists call transient hypofrontality a temporary reduction in activity in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the seat of self-monitoring, rumination, and executive worry. Intense physical sensation forces attention into the immediate present with such totality that the internal monologue simply stops. For someone who carries the weight of high responsibility, chronic stress, or relentless self-criticism, this enforced silence can feel like relief on a profound scale. The body under stress becomes the mind at peace ย one of masochism’s most striking paradoxes.
Everyday Masochism
It would be a mistake to treat masochism as an exclusively sexual or fringe phenomenon. Psychologists studying what they call “benign masochism” have identified the same underlying dynamic in thoroughly ordinary behavior. Deliberately eating food that makes your eyes water. Choosing to watch horror films or devastating dramas. Queuing for a roller coaster that will briefly make you feel you might die. In each case, the person voluntarily submits to a negative experience within a frame that makes it safe and finds satisfaction in the gap between the body’s alarm and the mind’s awareness that there is no real danger. As researcher Karolina Dyduch-Hazar puts it, the pleasure comes from being “fooled” by your own physiology and knowing it.
The Shadow of Trauma
Not everything about masochism is straightforwardly positive, and honest inquiry requires acknowledging complexity. Research published in Sexologies found a meaningful correlation between childhood abuse and adult sadomasochistic interests ย with sexual abuse most strongly associated with more intense expressions of both. This is not a deterministic relationship; most abuse survivors do not develop these interests, and most practitioners have no such history. But the correlation exists and demands thoughtful attention.
What this means clinically is genuinely contested. For some survivors, consensual BDSM appears to serve as a form of what therapists call “rescripting” revisiting the emotional territory of past powerlessness from a position of total agency. The survivor controls the encounter, sets the limits, and can end it at any moment. The passive victimization of the past becomes an active, chosen experience. Researcher Ateret Gewirtz-Meydan notes that the BDSM community’s strong emphasis on explicit negotiation and consent can itself be therapeutic, teaching survivors to articulate and defend their own boundaries.
But the risks are real too. Intense power dynamics can reactivate trauma rather than resolve it. Dissociation using the trance-like states BDSM can induce to avoid processing difficult emotions is a genuine hazard. The conclusion that emerges from the research is not a blanket endorsement or condemnation but a call for nuance: context, motivation, and individual history all matter enormously.
Unexpected Link to Chronic Pain
One of the more surprising findings in recent research is the relationship between masochism and chronic physical pain. A 2026 study in the European Journal of Pain found that roughly 47% of BDSM practitioners reported living with chronic pain conditions, compared to about 29% in a matched control group. Rather than suggesting that chronic pain is a consequence of these practices, researchers propose something more counterintuitive that for some people, voluntary acute pain functions as a coping strategy.
The logic is biochemical: a BDSM scene floods the body with the same opioids and endocannabinoids that the nervous system otherwise struggles to produce in the presence of persistent pain. But there is a psychological dimension too. Chronic pain is often experienced as something that happens to you relentless, arbitrary, and humiliating. Voluntary pain, by contrast, is chosen. It restores a sense of agency in a life that pain has made feel uncontrollable. Practitioners of sadomasochism, the study found, were significantly more likely to view pain as a challenge rather than a catastrophe a cognitive stance that may make them better equipped to endure it in all its forms.
What It All Means
The distance between Krafft-Ebing’s nineteenth-century pathology and today’s neuroscience is considerable. What was once catalogued as a perversion is now understood as a complex convergence of brain chemistry, psychological architecture, personal history, and social trust. Masochism exploits the body’s own stress-response systems to generate altered states of consciousness. It can offer escape from the prison of relentless self-awareness. It can, in certain circumstances, function as a path through trauma rather than a retreat from it.
Perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that pain like all human experience is not simply a fact about the body. It is an interpretation. And the mind, given the right conditions, is capable of extraordinary acts of reframing.
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