of the whole group of manifestations must be found in the essential facts of courtship among animal and primitive human societies.  Pain is seldom very far from some of the phases of primitive courtship; but it is not the pain which is the essential element in courtship, it is the state of intense emotion, of tumescence, with which at any moment, in some shape or another, pain may, in some way or another, be brought into connection.  So that we have come to see that in the phrase “love and pain” we have to understand by “pain” a state of intense emotional excitement with which pain in the stricter sense may be associated, but is by no means necessarily associated.  It is the strong emotion which exerts the irresistible fascination in the lover, in his partner, or in both.  The pain is merely the means to that end.  It is the lever which is employed to bring the emotional force to bear on the sexual impulse.  The question of love and pain is mainly a question of emotional dynamics.

In attaining this view of our subject we have learned that any impulse of true cruelty is almost outside the field altogether.  The mistake was indeed obvious and inevitable.  Let us suppose that every musical instrument is sensitive and that every musical performance involves the infliction of pain on the instrument.  It would then be very difficult indeed to realize that the pleasure of music lies by no means in the infliction of pain.  We should certainly find would-be scientific and analytical people ready to declare that the pleasure of music is the pleasure of giving pain, and that the emotional effects of music are due to the pain thus inflicted.  In algolagnia, as in music, it is not cruelty that is sought; it is the joy of being plunged among the waves of that great primitive ocean of emotions which underlies the variegated world of our everyday lives, and pain—­a pain which, as we have seen, is often deprived so far as possible of cruelty, though sometimes by very thin and feeble devices—­is merely the channel by which that ocean is reached.

If we try to carry our inquiry beyond the point we have been content to reach, and ask ourselves why this emotional intoxication exerts so irresistible a fascination, we might find a final reply in the explanation of Nietzsche—­who regarded this kind of intoxication as of great significance both in life and in art—­that it gives us the consciousness of energy and the satisfaction of our craving for power.[154] To carry the inquiry to this point would be, however, to take it into a somewhat speculative and metaphysical region, and we have perhaps done well not to attempt to analyze further the joy of emotional expansion.  We must be content to regard the profound satisfaction of emotion as due to a widespread motor excitement, the elements of which we cannot yet completely analyze.[155]

It is because the joy of emotional intoxication is the end really sought that we have to regard the supposed opposition between “sadism” and “masochism” as unimportant and indeed misleading.  The emotional value of pain is equally great whether the pain is inflicted, suffered, witnessed, or merely exists as a mental imagination, and there is no reason why it should not coexist in all these forms in the same person, as, in fact, we frequently find it.