Why We Hold On to Pain Even When It Hurts

Capitolo Aperto, October 2026: we read “Farsi male. Variazioni sul masochismo” (Hurting Oneself: Variations on Masochism) by Vittorio Lingiardi

One question runs through both clinical work and everyday life: why do we stay in a relationship that drains us, in a job that wears us down, in an image of ourselves that hurts us? And why, when things finally go well, do some of us feel the urge to ruin them?

For our latest Capitolo Aperto, we read a book that tries to answer without judgment. Vittorio Lingiardi’s essay starts from masochism, a word that in everyday language evokes pleasure in pain, and turns it around: not a taste for suffering, but loyalty to familiar territory.

The Fear of the Opposite

As we discussed it, the heart of the book is that the pain we inflict on ourselves rarely comes from a love of suffering itself. More often it comes from fear of its opposite. Feeling good can seem risky, because happiness appears fragile, almost suspect, while pain has the solidity of what we know.

That is why the familiar reassures us more than change does. Staying in a situation that makes us suffer becomes a way of being in the world: I know it, I know how to handle it, I feel at ease in it. The cost is high, but it is a predictable cost, and sometimes predictable is worth more than happy.

Not Masochism, but Many Masochisms

Lingiardi insists on one point: there is no such thing as the masochism, only many masochisms. Erotic, moral, social, narcissistic. We are all a little masochistic, but not in the same way, which makes it impossible to draw a clear line between a widespread trait and a disorder.

In the group, we asked ourselves where we would draw it anyway. One shared answer was to look at residual freedom. In a trait, hurting oneself is episodic, has a context, and leaves room for other strategies. In a disorder, it becomes the prevailing way of relating and regulating self-esteem, persists even when other paths are available, and damages work, relationships, and health. A good indicator is to ask whether the person can choose something else, or whether something keeps choosing for them.

The Lenses for Reading Pain

The book draws on multiple perspectives, and so did our discussion.

Classical psychoanalysis offers repetition compulsion, moral masochism, and identification with the aggressor. Lingiardi does not treat them as historical relics: he anchors them in attachment and in the relational and cultural context, rather than in an abstract death drive. Masochism thus becomes a language of bonds, not a biological destiny.

Attachment and trauma shift the gaze from blame to history. Those who repeat a painful relationship are not “masochistically” choosing it: often they are unconsciously loyal to a bond that, as children, was the only one possible. This reading removes the blame and the judgment of “they asked for it,” but returns responsibility in its healthiest sense. We are not guilty of our past, but we can become responsible for what we do with it.

The Ego Ideal and guilt explain the inner saboteur. A highly demanding Ego Ideal creates a constant gap between who we are and who we think we should be. Guilt fills that gap with self-punishment, and the saboteur punishes us before someone else can, as a form of control over pain. Many of us recognized ourselves in the image of someone who sabotages themselves precisely when things are going well.

Winnicott gave us the distinction between true self and false self. The false self is a social garment, built to meet other people’s expectations, and pain can arise from the distance between who we are and who we feel we must be. Finding the true self is a journey, and along the way art and poetry play a special role, because they keep a link with the unconscious and let us say what would otherwise remain mute.

When Words Fail, the Body Speaks

One of the most intense moments of the evening was the shift from invisible pain to visible pain. When emotional experience cannot be symbolized, it is somatized or acted out. Masochism makes physical a psychic pain that finds no words, and we see this, for example, in eating disorders: the body becomes the place where pain can be seen, touched, and, in some way, controlled.

Lingiardi reads self-harm in this light: not as a bid for attention, but as an attempt to regulate wordless pain, to make anguish visible, to feel real. It is a reading that restores dignity to a behavior too often dismissed with moral judgments. We asked ourselves what the relationship is between physical and psychic pain, and when one turns into the other.

Living With or Colluding With

Among the book’s most useful distinctions is the one between living with pain and colluding with it. Living with it means recognizing it, naming it, and giving it a place without making it the center of one’s life. Colluding means feeding it unknowingly: justifying it, returning to the same situations, building an identity around it. Those who live with it can change something; those who collude merely repeat.

It is a valuable criterion outside the clinic too, because it lets us talk about self-criticism without pathologizing it. And it has a practical consequence: before trying to “switch off” the inner saboteur, we need to understand what it is for. It almost always has a protective function: avoiding disappointment, preserving a bond, punishing first. Fighting it without understanding it generates resistance and shame, and often just moves the symptom elsewhere.

Pain Today: Filters, Performance, and Resilience

The discussion then brought the theme into the present. The mortification of the self can turn into deformation of the self: social media filters, “looksmaxxing” culture, all the way to incel communities and the manosphere, where distress becomes resentment and an extreme form of self-devaluation.

There is also the collective side. The rhetoric of resilience and optimization risks turning suffering into merit or performance, and individualizing it: if you suffer, it’s your fault. The book instead invites us to ask what pain is for, neither to display it nor to overcome it at all costs. We also noted a limit of the analogy between individual and society: collective phenomena have economic and political causes that psychology alone cannot exhaust.

A Polyphonic Book

One last note concerns method. Lingiardi uses cinema, literature, and poetry as tools of knowledge, not as ornaments. They render subjective experience in a way data cannot, and psychoanalysis itself was born from literature. The risk, as we said, is that narrative elegance gives the impression of proof: better to read this approach as knowledge complementary to empirical rigor, not as a substitute for it.

Hence also the questions we wished had been explored further: a more explicit comparison with empirical evidence, what actually works for people who hurt themselves, gender and cultural differences, and the social and political masochism of the final chapter.

What We Take Home

The book offers no quick fixes, and perhaps that is its merit. As Lingiardi writes, living without pain is impossible, but we can contain the damage by getting to know ourselves. In concrete terms, knowing ourselves means recognizing our patterns: when, with whom, and how we hurt ourselves, and what we are trying to protect in doing so.

The challenge with which the evening closed remains open. When we cannot change the situation, we can try to change ourselves, our way of being in it and of looking at it. And there is the question some of us would like to ask the author: when does hurting oneself stop being clinical material and simply become an almost healthy part of being human?

Have you read “Farsi male”? Tell us in the comments what it left you with. The next Capitolo Aperto is in two months, and we choose the book together.