In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel The Great Gatsby, a self-made millionaire aspires to win the heart of a woman he once loved. Daisy is married and unavailable, but Gatsby has idealized her for years. He knows that she appreciates the outward signs of wealth, fame, and power—things that confer status—so he reinvents himself as a wealthy tycoon, hoping this will impress her enough to make her value him. He benefits from this quest because it focuses his energies, motivates him, and brings him the clothes and cars and cash that sometimes make life fun and exciting. Gatsby makes his money by bootlegging liquor during Prohibition, when it was illegal and therefore risky and lucrative. Alcohol has destroyed myriad lives, but in moderation it has been part of the good life in many cultures for millennia; one could argue that Gatsby’s path to success was not so antisocial as to be self-discrediting—he is no Al Capone, and no Macbeth. But such success itself poses a problem: if it all works out, and Daisy is won over by glitz and bling, how will he know she really loves him? Gatsby is a man, not a Rolls Royce or a bank account.

The book ends in tragedy, when Gatsby is killed by another character. But had he lived, one possible outcome would’ve been a temporary affair between him and Daisy, followed by some kind of disillusion. Either she would reject him and stay with her boorish husband (Tom), or Gatsby would tire of her upon realizing that she loves his status, his money, his power, more than she is capable of loving him. Such disillusion would be agonizing, but it would do him a world of good. Disillusion is the way out of illusion, and some illusions can be extremely hard to escape because their logic has a seamless continuity that conceals the exits. Of course I want to live in a giant mansion; of course more money is always better, ad infinitum; of course a higher status will enhance my success at anything I could possibly undertake in life, including finding a mate. It is because these assumptions seem so obvious that their fundamental error is so hard to detect.

Freud taught that the purpose of psychoanalysis (it applies to mental health treatment in general) was to help people to love and to work. The idea that more-is-always-better has serious drawbacks on both sides. In work, it threatens what we call “work/life balance” and risks work addiction, in pursuit of ever-more earnings, far beyond our ability to enjoy them. In love, more-is-better can mean either of two troublesome things. It can mean I am stuck in a compulsive accumulation of temporary partners, building my “body count” without checking its effect on my wellbeing. Or it can mean I am doing what Gatsby did, pursuing just one partner, but using means that are accumulation-based: if I have more status than these competitors, then I’ll win the competition for her. What gets neglected here is the way my toys and my success can upstage the merely human, unique individual I actually am. I also may fail to notice how much my attention is diverted from my “Daisy” onto the men with whom I’m busy competing, jockeying for position, comparing the size of our houses (paging Dr. Freud), etc.

If such a disillusioned Gatsby can survive the disillusioning experience, he may win the real prize, one more valuable than the solid gold toilet, or the victory over his male rivals, or even Daisy herself. The real prize is a mature freedom: freedom from the endless compulsion to accumulate ever more status and wealth, and with it, freedom from the need to woo the kind of person who remains focused on that kind of stuff. Whoever escapes from the prison-house of status-seeking gets to love and be loved by people who are also free of it.

There are plenty of good reasons for a couple to want lots of money, or for a single person to want wealth in an eventual marriage. Raising kids, running a small business, keeping a theater afloat, endowing a community’s nonprofit, all these require plenty of cash and become impossible if there isn’t enough, and the list goes on and on. What’s not so good, is chasing wealth as a substitute for self-love, and hoping that the display of this wealth will attract somebody else who has the same confusion between wealth and love.

People who are unconsciously afraid of love might not be able to tolerate getting the love they really need, but do not want. So they collude with similar people to form relatively loveless couples, held together not by deep affection, acceptance, and desire, but by the glue of status, purchasing power, and the conspicuous display of resources. Real love is associated with eventual death, because if I fall in love with one unique, mortal, individual person, I will one day lose them and it will matter to me. If I marry someone I really love who really loves me, I move forward on what Kierkegaard called “the stages on life’s way,” and this means leaving youth behind and getting closer to the end. Focusing on status and trophies can instead create the illusion that I am outside of the arc of the life cycle, that my world is one of endless youthful playdates and context-free experience, often of a dissociative, thrill-seeking kind. Diverse pleasures have their place, and there’s nothing inherently bad about thrills. But it’s worth checking: am I doing this as a defense against something else? Might I be partying quite this much because I am avoiding something?

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

The sadomasochistic contract goes like this. The sadist says, I can do whatever I want to you, because I know you won’t leave me. The masochist says, You can do whatever you want to me, as long as you don’t leave me.

In the kink world, “masochism” means getting pleasure from pain. But in the mental health world, it refers to something very different: a chronic, unconscious need for punishment, and all the things a person does to indulge that need—unconsciously motivated mistakes, losses, self-defeating behaviors, regrettable remarks, anything that will trigger an authoritarian response from within, and/or a retaliation from without.

Kink is not to be pathologized, and people who enjoy it don’t have to fear that therapy will take their kinks away. But kink should be a free choice, an informed and deliberate selection among the options for a healthy sex life. Your submissiveness or sexual masochism might be an unchosen temperament that you discover inside yourself, but the erotic exercise of it ought to be a free choice.

Masochism outside the sexual sphere—an ongoing, dynamic need for punitive suffering—generally has no redeeming value. You might suppose it serves as a spur to achievement, but that’s just compulsion, not the voluntary embrace of work for work’s own intrinsic goodness. You might use it to assuage guilt, but that reinforces the guilt without addressing its irrational roots and its basic injustice. You might use punishment to stay connected to a parent whose love was autocratic and severe in a way that felt reassuringly firm and unmistakably present, but that prevents a healthier form of love from developing in its place. The need for punishment is a relic of old defenses that have come to cost more than they’re worth.

The way out involves correctly labeling the masochism as an old solution to an old problem, reinforcing its connection to the past that explains it. That was then; this is now. So there’s a new opportunity to settle things differently, in a less moralistic way, geared to the facts at hand, not to the old situation and its more primitive world of tyranny and hierarchy. Long ago, that world taught you that a cosmic balance would only be maintained if you contributed sacrifices to it, in the form of large chunks of your personal pain. This has long since turned out not to be true, but the masochism somehow got locked-in by a hidden contract that runs on misguided loyalty to the child parts-of-self that first signed onto it. It may also be enforced by an equally unconscious hope of eventual rescue-from-outside, so that breaking the contract (giving up the need for punishment) is linked to despair about rescue and guilt about disloyalty.

The present masochism gets dissolved by reaching for the past, where the explanation lies, and the future, where the possibilities are. In the future, I will one day die—and my renewed awareness of this finitude wakes me to the fact that I might-as-well let go of the old need for suffering. Also in the future, but closer to the present, are all the nights and days I still might enjoy if I can dissolve the masochistic pact in a solvent stronger than fear, which is love. I am more loyal to my child self, not less loyal, if I dissolve the contract I signed as a little kid and replace it with loving nurturance and protection, the free gift from my adult self to this terrified inner kid. The long-awaited rescue from outside is really a rescue from inside, because it’s from a part of me—but it is from outside the child part, as its source is the grown-up self I have become in the long meantime. Therapy helps to direct resources to this loving adult self, rather than let those current resources get routinely burned-up in the service of the old masochistic machinery. The well-resourced adult self is better able to bestow those resources, as loving-kindness, onto the child parts of you that need it most.