Between symptoms and literature: Psychoanalysis and choosing literature names

Abstract

This article analyzesthe epistemological singularity that implies the use, both by the medical-psychiatric field, and -and especially -by psychoanalysis, of the proper names of Sade and Sacher-Masoch, literature authors no medical authors, in their symptomatological tables.The names of Sade and Masoch identify certain well-known psychic conditions, as well as help to organize a taxonomy of the field of perversions: sadism and masochism. The text discourses two conceptual topics that derive from this epistemological choice: the first aims to determine which very specific conditions and characteristics these symptomatologies must possess so that they cannot be named, as usual, with the names of physicians who recognize and isolate the symptomatic set. The second topic examinesa certain non-literary use that psychoanalysis proposes of these literate-named symptoms, the affirmation of the necessary constitution of a sadomasochistic complex. In this sense, the article finds that, if we take into consideration the literatures of Sade and Masoch, -in what they expose about psychic types and desiring production -this complex, this reunion, would not be possible. Psychoanalysis would bring together what literature so carefully differentiated. To further this reflection, the text follows Gilles Deleuze's reading of Sacher Masoch's work in his Sacher-Masoch Presentation: Cold and Cruel.