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Originally written in 1886 by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, "Psychopathia Sexualis" was a ground-breaking study in the science of sexual pathology. Influencing writers and philosophers, as well as Krafft-Ebing's fellow psychiatrists (a young Sigmund Freud studied with the author at the University of Vienna), the book still has a far reaching impact on the development of modern sexual perception.
Perhaps nothing else so clearly reveals the influence of "Psychopathia Sexualis" as the fact that people still use Krafft-Ebing's language to describe sexual practices today – "sadism," "masochism" and "fetishism" are all terms made popular by this book. -- Michael Rosen-Molina
The abbreviation s/m points to both sadist/masochist and slave/master while the slash indicates for some that the two roles are in general not exclusive, but reversible. The term sadomasochism is coined by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der Psychopathia sexualis (1886). He defined it as mostly imaginary pleasure in pain. The word has noble ancestry as it derived from the names of Marquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740-1814) and Knight Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895).
Krafft-Ebing coined the words sadism and masochism from the names of the authors, the Marquis de Sade and Sacher von Masoch. Kraft-Ebing connected them as two sides of the same coin.