The author challenges some of the traditional views regarding perverse masochism, drawing on a case of a male subject who had carried out perverse practices for much of his life only to eventually abandon them. While some conventional conceptions note common elements to perverse masochism, such as castration anxiety and rich fantasy, the author shows that it’s instead characterized by limited oneiric activity, the absence of anxiety, and suggests that the masochist not only does not fear castration, but even desires it. In contrast to Freud, for whom masochism would be the trace of the combination between Eros and the death drive, the author does not refer to the latter, speaking rather in terms of the constancy principle and constitutional elements. The author argues that perverse masochism could be considered as one tool (among others) for dealing with the excess quantity of drives that a subject is unable to manage through mental mechanisms.

Freud’s reflections on masochism are here reconsidered and situated within the general project of Freudian thought, described in terms of a metaphysical anthropology based on the Lustprinzip, the pleasure-desire principle. The author provides a detailed analysis of Freud’s “The economic problem of masochism”, and of moral masochism in particular, since this latter constitutes, to a much greater extent than the other forms of masochism, an apparently insurmountable problem for the Lustprinzip-based theory. In keeping with the more mature Freudian view, the author proposes setting aside the primacy of the Lustprinzip in favor of providing an opening for the crucial role of ethical experience, understood as a basic erotic relation to the other.

The author’s objective is to find a meaning in the astonishing response of frozen paralysis on behalf of the Federal Reserve when faced with the subprime mortgage crisis. The author’s first procedural move is the fictional reduction of the subprime crisis to a plot acted out on the stage by two actors, the wretched house borrower without money and the predatory loan-giver, watched by a third actor, the Fed. In the fictional distribution of characters, the Fed plays the role of a terrorized little girl exposed to the traumatic scene of her perverse parents engaged in a mortal struggle of reciprocal sado-masochistic exploitation. Following psychoanalytical teaching, this traumatic scene has its paradigm in the primal scene, the sexual intercourse between parents that the young child watches as an awful enigma arousing at once sexual excitement and fear. The response to the trauma of the primal scene places itself in a range of five psycho-biological reactions to the basic emotion of fear, among which the freeze reaction, the Fed’s frozen paralysis. The original response to the primal scene, specific to each child, persists throughout life, guiding even political and economic choices. For example, it wouldn’t be arbitrary to put together the freeze response of the Fed’s representative Alan Greenspan to the mortgage crisis with his choice in favor of laissez- faire dominated free market economics, the principle of allowing the market to go at will, without intervening to change it. Both the response and the choice derive from the likely original freeze response by the infant Alan to his own primal scene in 1929.