"It's so long since I've had sex, I've forgotten who ties up whom."
-- Joan Rivers.
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.
A good many authorities have since rejected that link. French philosopher Jacques Lacan wrote, "Masochism is not inverted sadism." Derrida suggests that masochism may be primary and that a major connection is needed to break the complementarity originally conceived between sadism and masochism. Deleuze writes that "As soon as we read Masoch, we become aware that his universe has nothing to do with that of de Sade..."
Gilles Deleuze has argued, contra Freud, that masochism and sadism are not "complementary" perversions, but rather constitute two different perversions with different aims, aesthetics, and ends. According to Deleuze, one characteristic that differentiates the masochistic scene from the sadistic scene is the fact that the masochist must seduce the sexual partner into meting out punishment, while in the sadistic scenario, the sadist is pursuing his own desire to inflict pain. -- JOHN CHAMPAGNE in http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/36/pianoteacher3.html
The common misperception that the sadist is the perfect partner for the
masochist and vice-versa is systematically destroyed in the analysis of
Deleuze and other philosophers. Most recently, Anita Phillips' long
essay, A DEFENCE OF MASOCHISM, abruptly maintains that "the masochist
and the sadist are an impossible couple" (11).
-- Glauco Mattoso in http://sites.uol.com.br/formattoso/informative.htm
We would like to suggest that sado-masochism is a syndrome that ought to be split up into irreducible causal chains. It has been stated so often that sadism and masochism are found in the same person that we have come to believe it. We need to go back to the beginning and read Sade and Masoch. Because the judgment of the clinician is prejudiced, we must take an entirely different approach, the literary approach, since it is from literature that stem the original definitions of sadism and masochism. It is no accident that the names of two writers were used as labels for these two perversions. The critical (in the literary sense) and the clinical ( in the medical sense) may be destined to enter into a new relationship of mutual learning. Symptomatology is always a question of art; the clinical specificities of sadism and masochism are not separable from the literary values peculiar to Sade and Masoch. In place of a dialectic which all too readily perceives the link between opposites, we should aim for a critical and clinical appraisal able to reveal the truly differential mechanisms as well as the artistic originalities.