Punishment request
In psychology, a desire for punishment is understood as the mostly unconscious or preconscious intention to be punished for one's own behavior. Desires for punishment are to be understood as a defense mechanism . They are viewed here from the point of view of emotional and / or physical strivings against oneself, which have the purpose of relieving the psyche .
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There are two forms of desire for punishment known in depth psychology .
The need for punishment as an expiation wish for non-conforming behavior
This endeavor is related to the mechanism of relief for the psychic apparatus, which Theodor Reik first comprehensively explored and explained in 1925 in his work Compulsory Confession and Need for Punishment, when an act unconsciously or consciously perceived as socially non-conforming (forbidden) by the super-ego or the ego or failure of hierarchically higher people to be negatively sanctioned . A kind of purification process, as it is anchored in all cultures as a ritual that is often religiously bound . Desires for punishment of this nature arise from case to case and at every age. Often, so-called mistakes bring the prohibited action to light . It is popularly said that the guilty conscience betrays itself.
The child's desire for punishment as an attempt to establish contact
Behind an always unconscious (apparent) desire for punishment in children is the attempt to obtain at least selective attention from caregivers who otherwise largely deny the child the urgently needed emotional closeness and positive confirmation or who refuse to do so in the long term. Not in the expectation, but rather in the unconscious hope of being punished, the child behaves so “deliberately” inconsistently in order to enable his punishment. It can be assumed that there is usually a reaction to this type of desire for punishment .
If the approx. 12-year-old protagonist in the comedy Klaus in the closet or Das verkehrte Weihnachtsfest by Erich Kästner (1927) wants to be beaten as a punishment , because “then you at least notice that you have parents”, this is a fact typical example of a desire for punishment in the sense discussed here; the alleged awareness of the wish has hardly ever existed in this form in the child, but has only outgrown the analytical knowledge (or intuition) of the adult author.
If this remains an auxiliary maneuver to establish contact with rejecting or indifferent caregivers, in the long term the only way in which a child can reach a surrogate of closeness, conditioning can develop from it . It may happen that the child repeatedly does something forbidden, is naughty or angry , so that punishment is necessary (possible) again and again . Often this sets in motion a career of socially harmful and, of course, always massively self-harming behavior.
As long as this mechanism also remains unconscious to the grown up traumatized individual, it usually appears as a compulsive repetition for life, whereby it can manifest itself in various forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder or a personality disorder can establish itself. A sexualization may but need not be. According to the findings of Fritz Morgenthaler and others , it is often psycho-economically healthier to act out wishes for punishment amicably as an adult , as long as no more satisfactory transformation option has been found for them.
It can be assumed that in connection with these punishment requests i. d. As a rule, the child's aggression against himself, which was originally directed against the caregiver, also unconsciously becomes effective and an identification with the aggressor, which remains unconscious and is relevant to survival in cases of severe trauma, occurs (cf. inter alia Sándor Ferenczi , Anna Freud , Horst-Eberhard Richter ).
On the basis of this unconscious identification with the aggressor, the personal childhood experiences are often directly or indirectly passed on to the next generation, regardless of willful intentions, as long as there is no awareness of the identification with the aggressor and its original , for example on the way of psychotherapy Cause comes. In many family histories, a chain of domestic violence can be identified over several generations.
An understanding of such processes can also be used in order to better understand collective forms of seemingly or actually masochistic behavior in civil societies.
Viewed from a completely different point of view, desires for punishment could nonetheless also be descendants of the death instinct postulated by Sigmund Freud from around 1920 , that is, a manifestation of the tendency he assumed to be self- destructive.
See also
literature
- Theodor Reik: Compulsory Confession and Need for Punishment (1925)
- Theodor Reik: The Unknown Murderer (1932)
- Theodor Reik: From Suffering Joys (1940)
- Hans Zulliger: Dealing with the Child's Conscience (1953)
- Sándor Ferenczi: Linguistic confusion between adults and children (1932), in: Schriften zur Psychoanalyse II , Gießen 2004
- Anna Freud: The I and the Defense Mechanisms (1936)
- Horst-Eberhard Richter: Parents, Child and Neurosis. The role of the child in the family / psychoanalysis of the child's role (1962)
- Fritz Morgenthaler: Homosexuality - Heterosexuality - Perversion (1984)
- Sigmund Freud: Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
- Sigmund Freud: The Uneasiness in Culture (1930)