Does Passivity Lead to Victimization?

Psychopathology of Victims of Aggression

By: THEODORE MILLON and

      Seth Grossman

      Carrie Millon

      Sarah Meagher

      Rowena Ramnath

Self-defeating personality disorder (called the masochistic personality in this text) was dropped from the DSM-IV as a diagnostic category. The decision came after considerable debate over the viability and clinical utility of the construct (Fiester, 1991).

Many authors, in fact, have argued that the disorder was dropped for essentially political reasons.

In spite of the decision by the Axis II committee, the masochistic personality has a long clinical tradition useful in describing the behavior of certain patients.

Although passivity under conditions of threat may be an adaptive response and, therefore, should not be pathologized, some individuals seem to manifest vulnerabilities that incite aggression from others. In the interpersonal perspective, for example, the principle of complementarity holds that submission elicits dominance from others.

Rather than eliminate the masochist from DSM-IV, it would have been wiser to have retained it in the appendix as a provisional disorder in need of further study.

How might such vulnerabilities arise? One possibility is child abuse (Chabrol et al., 1995).The literature on childhood victimization suggests that children chronically victimized by their peers suffer from deficits in self-esteem. Perhaps children with low self-esteem are unable to fight back for some reason or more readily become the focus of teasing or scapegoating.

In fact, chronic victimization by peers during the school years is associated with a variety of adjustment problems (Egan & Perry, 1998). Studies have found that submissiveness and physical weakness, for example, may lead to increased victimization over time (Hodges, Malone, & Perry, 1997; Schwartz, Dodge, & Coie, 1993).

Egan and Perry (1998) tested two hypotheses: First, low self-regard promotes victimization by peers over time, and second, a child’s level of self-regard modulates the impact of victimization. Results suggest that low self-regard, particularly when assessed as a child’s self-perceived social competence within the peer group, contributes to victimization. Moreover, a sense of social failure and inadequacy among an individual’s peers leads to increases in victimization over time. However, a sense of self-efficacy, measured as confidence in an individual’s standing in the peer group, serves to protect at-risk children from being victimized.

From this perspective, masochistic behavior in adults could be seen as being on a continuum with low self-regard within the peer group. As perceived competence within the peer group decreases and self-regard declines, the individual at first becomes the object of minor levels of victimization. With further declines, however, victimization grows, until finally a sort of identification with the aggressor takes place. Instead of trying to escape punishment, victims see themselves as being so contemptible that such treatment is their due. Masochism, then, could be seen as a maladaptive adjustment to extreme social inadequacy.

References

Personality Disorders in Modern Life, second edition, 2000, 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Self-Defeating (Masochistic) Personality, Case vignette (1)