Overview

Sadomasochism has a complex conceptualisation that is difficult to use in psychiatry, and is even divided into sadism and masochism. However, understanding the concept of sadomasochism in psychoanalytic literature allows us to understand the relationships of pleasure and pain in subjects and imputed to others, beyond the world of purely sexual relationships, which we conceptualise as Social Sadomasochism. Pleasure is not only present in the arena of sexuality, which calls us to study and understand the multiple forms, acts and even crimes that are so accentuated in contemporary societies as forms of experiencing sadomasochism today, a discussion that leads us to identify how sadomasochism reinforces the desire and pleasure of killing, torturing and imputing suffering to others. We discussed this based on psychoanalytic knowledge in the clinic in relation to perversion and also by observing multiple cruel forms of treatment in society, as well as contact with inmates in a prison in the interior of Pernambuco, accused of murder, necrophilia, cannibalism, paedophilia, theft and drug trafficking, seeking to make a biographical survey of their childhoods.