Sadistic Personality Disorder

Sadistic personality disorder is a personality disorder involving sadism which appeared in an appendix of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R). The later versions of the DSM (DSM-IV, DSM-IV-TR and DSM-5) do not include it.

The words sadism and sadist are derived from Marquis de Sade.

Definition

Sadism involves deriving pleasure through others undergoing discomfort or pain. The opponent-process theory is one way to help explain how an individual may come to not only display, but also enjoy committing sadistic acts. Individuals possessing sadistic personalities tend to display recurrent aggression and cruel behavior. Sadism can also include the use of emotional cruelty, purposefully manipulating others through the use of fear, and a preoccupation with violence.

Theodore Millon claimed there were four subtypes of sadism, which he termed enforcing sadism, explosive sadism, spineless sadism, and tyrannical sadism.

Comorbidity with other personality disorders

Sadistic personality disorder has been found to occur frequently in unison with other personality disorders. Studies have also found that sadistic personality disorder is the personality disorder with the highest level of comorbidity to other types of psychopathological disorders. In contrast, sadism has also been found in patients who do not display any or other forms of psychopathic disorders. One personality disorder that is often found to occur alongside sadistic personality disorder is conduct disorder, not an adult disorder but one of childhood and adolescence. Studies have found other types of illnesses, such as alcoholism, to have a high rate of comorbidity with sadistic personality disorder.

Researchers have had some level of difficulty distinguishing sadistic personality disorder from other forms of personality disorders due to its high level of comorbidity with other disorders.

Removal from the DSM

Numerous theorists and clinicians introduced sadistic personality disorder to the DSM in 1987 and it was placed in the DSM-III-R as a way to facilitate further systematic clinical study and research. It was proposed to be included because of adults who possessed sadistic personality traits but were not being labeled, even though their victims were being labeled with a self-defeating personality disorder. Theorists like Theodore Millon wanted to generate further study on SPD, and so proposed it to the DSM-IV Personality Disorder Work Group, who rejected it. Millon writes that "Physically abusive, sadistic personalities are most often male, and it was felt that any such diagnosis might have the paradoxical effect of legally excusing cruel behavior."

Sub-clinical sadism in personality psychology

There is renewed interest in studying sadism as a personality trait. Sadism joins with subclinical psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism to form the so-called "dark tetrad" of personality.

Summary of Sadism

People are innately hostile. Clearly, many people are always angry and vent by being destructive and assaultive. Even during sporting events, many spectators lose their minds! Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud firmly believed that most of what people do has an aggressive basis. "The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man and... constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture." (Civilization, Freud) People are clearly disposed to routine over-aggression through various types and degrees of selfish, destructive, hostile, and violent thoughts and behaviors.

According to the American Psychological Association’s dictionary (2020), sadism is “the derivation of pleasure through cruelty and inflicting pain, humiliation, and other forms of suffering on individuals. … In the classical psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, sadism is attributed to the working of the death instinct and is manifested in innate aggressive tendencies expressed from the earliest stages of development.” (https://dictionary.apa.org/sadism) Individuals possessing sadistic personalities tend to display recurrent aggression and cruel behavior. In essence, part of human nature is that most people are at least somewhat sadistic.

In Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited (2015), S. Vaknin agrees with T. Millon that Sadistic Personality Disorder (SPD) is alive and well. SPD is a personality trait characterized by a person’s “pattern of gratuitous cruelty, aggression, and demeaning behaviors which indicate the existence of deep-seated contempt for other people and an utter lack of empathy.”

“Sadistic personality disorder” was a personality disorder diagnosis involving sadism that appeared in the third edition of the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R). Today, the “dark triad” is seen as a group of three personality traits with malevolent qualities. Sadism is part of the Dark Triad traits, so, recently, researchers have introduced the “Dark Tetrad”—the main difference being the addition of subclinical sadism. Sadism includes both modest physical and severe emotional abuse, purposefully manipulating others through the use of fear, and a preoccupation with violence. There is an overlap with psychopathy. (PsycINFO Database Record, 2019 APA).

Many people undertake wrongful, harmful actions simply for the sheer pleasure of being cruel. That is why they do wrong—they actually ENJOY it! This is sadism. Many just love feeling schadenfreude, “the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of, or witnessing, the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another.” (Azarian, 2018).

“In a letter home during the Civil War, Elisha Rhodes wrote, ‘Even the late battle has become an old story. Some of our men actually become crazy for the excitement.’” (Ward 73). Linderman (1997) tells us that one WWII soldier wrote that, “… battle could be so incredibly impressive—awful, horrible, deadly, yet somehow thrilling, exhilarating.” (Linderman 237). During the Iraq War, U.S. Army and Central Intelligence Agency personnel committed human rights violations against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Some of those prison guards, who now have PTSD, admit they enjoyed torturing prisoners at the time of their military duty assignment. (Risen 165). Veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges writes, “The lust for violence, the freedom to eradicate the world around them, even human lives, is seductive. And the line that divides us, who would like to see ourselves as civilized and compassionate from such communal barbarity is razor thin.” (Hedges 171).

“[T]here is possibly some kind of underlying streak of sadism in human beings, particularly for (some) men, for whom the use of murder, torture, and terrorism is an avenue to power or prestige” (Thomson 255).

Many people do horrible, atrocious, and despicably violent deeds. War, crime, and vice are not aberrant human behavior; instead, they are common events for mankind—having existed without interruption from the beginning of time. Far more people commonly do at least moderately bad, rotten deeds of one type or another. Hence, they all damage the welfare and well-being of others (their victims) to some degree!

The goal of most true sadists is to have absolute control over living beings. One of the manifestations of absolute control is to force someone (or an animal) to endure pain or humiliation without being able to defend him- or herself. In 1963, psychologist Stanley Milgram set out to test people's propensity to obey an evil authority figure when ordered to hurt another person (the victim) with electric shock as key to a learning experiment to which they had volunteered to participate for a small payment (see original film at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdrKCilEhC0). Despite the screams and moans of pain from the learner “test subject,” the study volunteers (40 in total) serving as punitive “teachers” (the people doing the shocking) continued to deliver ever-more severe electric shocks if ordered to do so by the experimenter (i.e., the authority figure). It was shown that seemingly regular people could quickly turn dispassionately cruel and sometimes sadistic. This infamous "shock" experiment showed just how far people would go when ordered by an authority figure to hurt somebody else. (Milgram. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HcMWlnTtFQ). In 2008, Professor Jerry M. Burger replicated Milgram’s experiment with the same results. (Burger). The Milgram and Burger experiments proved that most people, to one degree or another, have the capacity for sadism and undue deference to a malignant authority figure. Among other proofs of this concept, in 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted Stanford’s “prison experiment” with 24 undergraduates and assigned them roles as either “prisoners” or “guards” in a mock prison. After just a few days, 1/3 of the guards became sadistic toward prisoners (sounds like Abu Ghraib)! This is scientific confirmation of the idea that many people harbor cruel tendencies lying in wait.

Most people are clearly disposed to ongoing over-aggression as a result of preexisting sadistic thoughts and behaviors.

See also

• Antisocial personality disorder, a personality disorder characterized by a long term pattern of disregard for, or violation of, the rights of others
• Evil Genes
• Bullying
• Malignant narcissism
• Psychopathy
• Sadism and masochism
• Schadenfreude
• Self-defeating personality disorder (masochistic personality disorder)
• Sexual sadism disorder
• Zoosadism