The main aim of this book is to generate a better understanding of how punishment has provided audiences with pleasure in different historical contexts. The question – how punishment produces pleasure – is understood against the background of the problematic of desire. It is a problematic defined by the inescapable tension between desire and enjoyment. The prob-lematic of desire was brought to the world’s attention by Sigmund Freud. In a footnote, later added to the first of the Three Essays on Sexuality, he said that ‘the only appropriate word’ in German – Lust – was inevitably ambiguous, and designated ‘the experience both of a need and of a gratification’ (Freud 1953: 135 fn 2). The very word was ambiguous, and so was the corresponding conception. Freud’s conception of pleasure covered both desire and satisfac-tion; on the one hand ‘wishing, wanting and desiring’ and on the other hand ‘enjoyment and satisfaction’ (Schuster 2016: 101). In itself, the distinction was not new. It was central to the classic Platonic approach to pleasure. In Gorgias, Plato treated desire as distress and satisfaction as the relief of dis-tress, thereby posing the problem of transformation: how could experiences, ranging from acute pain to a mere sense of unease, transform into the very opposite, the experience of being at ease? Plato’s conception of pleasure was modelled after the satisfaction of bodily needs: hunger, thirst and sex. There is a perpetual movement back and forth: desire turns into satisfaction, which recedes into desire, a desire that may turn into renewed satisfaction, or not, and so forth. Freud discovered the tension, or the radical disjunction between desire and enjoyment. Desire and enjoyment were essentially irreconcilable. There can be no simple match, no carefree immersion in everyday life. It has been explicated as forces pulling in different directions; ‘desire goes one way, and satisfaction another’ (Schuster 2016: 122). I prefer the metaphor of a gap to describe the relationship. Throughout the book, I will talk about the gap between desire and enjoyment. The word ‘gap’ emphasizes their essen-tial irreconcilability, as well as the necessity to bridge the gap, by actions or interventions, to transform desire into enjoyment.