El sadomasoquismo: una estructura circular

the 18th century, marked by the licentiousness of the european courts, saw the emergence of sade's erotic literature, where there is evidence of an imagination of pleasure set aside from any ideological hindrance. this indeed put him 30 years in prison. a century later sacher-masoch would describe in his novels another type of erotic practice, in which the main theme will be pleasure related to slavery of love. it cannot be said that sade's and sacher masoch's visions are complementary -as gilles deleuze and lacan have mentioned- however the 19th century psychiatrists found in this literary pieces the justification to create two complementary nosological frames: sadism and masochism. this psychiatric visión had such influence that since then sadomasochism has been considered as a couple, in other words, as two positions observed in a mirror and identified in two different persons that play in two opposite sides but that at the same time complement each other. freud separated himself from the idea of the opposites by conceiving the drive as an inseparable pair: the sadomasochism. freud's article a child is being beaten (1919) became a classic, there the three stages of this fantasy of being beaten are deployed, that would lead lacan, french psychoanalyst, to raise the drive as a circular movement, for it to introduce a third one, the other, and to reject, for the same reason, this idea of complementarily as well as the thesis that supports that there would be two opposite pleasures.