Algolagnia

However, Krafft-Ebing's theories in Psychopathia Sexualis – where the terms sadism and masochism were used – were adopted by Sigmund Freud and became an integral part of psychoanalysis, thereby ensuring their predominance over the concept of "algolagnia".

Eugen Kahn, Smith Ely Jelliffe, William Alanson White, and Hugh Northcote were other early psychological researchers into algolagnia.

This view began to change once the Kinsey Reports noted that many seemingly normal people often enjoy pain in a sexual context, and later Norman Breslow found that, before 1977, only four previous studies in all the scientific literature were empirical in nature.

In 1993 Thomas Wetzstein published a large-scale study of his local subculture from a sociological viewpoint, confirming Spengler's results and expanding on them.

[12] No empirical study has found a connection to violent crimes or evidence for an increased tendency towards any sociopathological behavior in algolagnia or the related features of sexual sadomasochism, as had been generally assumed since Krafft-Ebing's era.