The word sadism carries, within it, a proper name: Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade (1740, 1814).
The man behind the name
Sade wrote works such as Justine, The 120 Days of Sodom and Philosophy in the Bedroom, describing with detail and coldness acts of physical, sexual and moral cruelty. For him, the human being was an amoral animal, governed by the instinct of domination, and his implicit motto was total freedom, even if it implied the destruction of others.
How the name became a clinical term
The term "sadism" was only born a century later, coined in the 19th century by psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, author of the classic Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), to describe the obtaining of pleasure through the pain, humiliation or submission of others, behavior that he saw portrayed in Sade's writings. Then the idea went beyond the sexual sphere, appropriated by clinical psychology to describe a pathological pattern of pleasure in dominating, hurting and controlling.
The difference between Sade and clinical sadism
Sade uses cruelty as a philosophical, literary and political provocation, a radical thesis about freedom. THE clinical sadist makes cruelty a real and recurrent lifestyle, with authentic emotional pleasure, not an idea to defend. It was this distinction that Viktor Frankl made when observing guards at Nazi concentration camps: he was not writing literature, he was diagnosing.
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Where does the word sadism come from?
It comes from the name of the Marquis de Sade, Donatien Alphonse François (1740, 1814), a French writer who described in his works acts of physical, sexual and moral cruelty. The term itself was only coined in the nineteenth century.
Who coined the term sadism?
Psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, author of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), to describe the obtaining of pleasure through the pain, humiliation or submission of another, based on the behaviors he saw portrayed in Sade's writings.
Is clinical sadism the same thing as Sade's work?
No. Sade uses cruelty as a philosophical, literary and political provocation. The clinical sadist makes cruelty a real and recurrent lifestyle, with authentic emotional pleasure, not a thesis about freedom.
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