Sir, – Frank McNally (An Irishman’s Diary, October 12th) may be a glutton for punishment in learning German, but it is to Austria not Germany that we owe the term masochism The word was introduced by the Austrian psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing in his book Psychopathia Sexualis, in tribute to the private life of his fellow Austrian Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch.
Appropriately enough, Sacher-Masoch found it a painful humiliation to have his name linked to a sexual perversion, though the subsequent publication of a memoir by his first wife, Aurora von Rümelin, Meine Lebensbeichte (My Confession), confirmed that it was, indeed, a fitting coupling.
Members of the troika are masochist by choice not descent, but Sacher-Masoch is the great-great-uncle of Marianne Faithfull through her Viennese mother, Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso. – Yours, etc,