thumb|[[Wartenberg wheel pain stimulation of the areola and nipple]]
Algolagnia (; from , álgos, "pain", and , lagneía, "lust") is a sexual tendency which is defined by deriving sexual pleasure and stimulation from physical pain, in contrast to Krafft-Ebing's interpretations. With such titles as Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, Love and Pain, The Sexual Impulse in Women and The Evolution of Modesty, The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity, Auto-Erotism, Ellis described the basics of the condition. Eugen Kahn, Smith Ely Jelliffe, William Alanson White, and Hugh Northcote were other early psychological researchers into algolagnia.
Research
In 1992, algolagnia was described as a physical phenomenon in which the brain interprets pain signals as pleasurable leading to psychological effects. One of the researchers whom Breslow cited as having empirically-valid work, Andres Spengler, concluded that earlier research was "heavily burdened with prejudice and ignorance" against those whose sexual practices were in the minority, falsely assuming behaviors to be pathological when in fact they were statistically abnormal, but harmless. 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.
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.
The term algolagnia has fallen into rare usage, and there is no entry for it in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM IV-TR. Inflicting pain on others has been termed "active algolagnia" and equated to the pathological form of sadism in Mosby's Medical Dictionary, which also equates the pathological form of masochism to "passive algolagnia", but it cannot be a pathological (dangerous) paraphilia form of sadism or masochism unless it involves pain inflicted on "non-consenting" persons, or "cause[s] marked distress or interpersonal difficulty." And using algolagnia as both a pathological and non-pathological term, some in the modern research community still link it to some but not all BDSM activities.
See also
Footnotes
References
- Ellis, on algolagnia
- Chapter XVI: "Sexual Perversions", *Christianity and Sex Problems*—A 1907 book on algolagnia