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xiv Introduction speaking of sadomasochism when she wrote about that “black inward unhappiness—like a septic arm physically, all black and swollen. If you could cut it and let the poison out, it would flow away harmlessly. Yes, poor soul, poor soul.” Analogies such as these soon break down, but up to a point this helps us understand why somebody would want to work at cross- purposes to himself or herself and would find the biblical suggestion to “love thy neighbor” if not laughable, then in today’s neighborhoods, at least according to the individual’s own personality structure, unproductive, inadvisable, and practically speaking indefensible. Attempting to understand sadomasochism via reference to fiction (and nonfiction) can be equally helpful for revealing crucial aspects of sadomas- ochism. Reading the well-known story about the oral sadomasochism of the human vampire bat teaches us something and is thrilling in addition to being revealing, as are the many stories in the Bible and in mythology that deal with premature and untimely ends of heroic characters (such as the horrific demise of poor John the Baptist who instead of fighting back underwent a sadistic “castration” at the hands of the equally sadistic King Herod, enabling the fearsome sadomasochistic wishes of the terrible Salome to come to fruition). The 12 trials of Hercules and Delilah’s shear- ing of Sampson’s locks, sapping his strength, are stories of heroes who do more penance in a day than almost any imaginable individual or group collectively does in an entire lifetime, and in at least Salome’s case, her ter- rible end may reveal how she was an ultimate masochist at heart (doing her Dance of Death). My book tells the familiar story of the need of an individual or a group to identify a rival and abusively show him or her up—someone to fight with or conquer not as an inspirational climax in the form of an outburst of camaraderie, equality, and the final joy of love but rather as the tale of the individual breakups of a “love affair,” the boss firing one of his or her best workers, or the political group out not to challenge a rival group’s pol- icy/philosophy for good reason but instead to dismember a rival group’s potentially finest intellectual and worldly achievements. We tell the all- too-familiar story of becoming a cropper of destruction by one’s own hand as the sadistic boomerang turns into the ultimate masochistic weapon, harming the one who threw it into the air in the first place only to experi- ence surprise at where exactly it fell to Earth.