Terence Sellers

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Terence Sellers is an American author and psychologist, specializing in sadomasochism. After graduating from John Jay College in New York City and from St. John's College, she became an editor and reviewer. She has published multiple books on sadism.

Sellers was born Terry Christine Sellers in Washington D.C., 1952, to John Robert Sellers, a writer and Gloria Ruth Schlosser, a painter. Her father "Bob" was an autodidact and avid book-collector, and instilled in her the ambition to be a writer by the age of seven. "Terry" became "Teresa" in Catholic school for ten years, when the 60s intervened and she enjoyed the freedom of public school for her last two years in high-school.
Though superficially a bohemian like her parents and a 'hippie', she was drawn intellectually to the classics, and attended the famous St. John's College, Santa Fe campus, and studied "The Great Books." Her father's financial problems assured her an early foray into earning her own living, and without graduating or returning home, she moved to New York City at the age of 19 in 1972.
Early experiments in writing were heavily influenced by the French Decadents: Baudelaire, Mallarme and Nerval, as well as the French Surrealists. Jean Genet was a very early favorite, based partly on her knowledge of her father's own incarceration when she was five years of age.
Being something of an autodidact herself, her library in a tiny New York apartment at 21 Jones Street, financed by a secretary's salary, burgeoned. She taught herself French, visiting France several times in the convening years. Her father's influence included the burly American ethos of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and John O'Hara.

Other early interests were in abnormal psychology and psychoanalysis, in which she read widely. She was herself in analysis for close to twenty years. By the age of twenty she understood she possessed a psyche dominated by sado-masochstic matrices. Her subsequent readings, studies and experiements in sadomasochistic psychology and behaviour led her to write the seminal work, "The Correct Sadist," which was first published by ikoo-Buchverlg in Berlin in 1981 as Der korrekte Sadismus. She undertook to self-publish it under the imprint "V.I.T.R.I.O.L," a medieval acronym referring to the transformation of lead into gold. This self-publishing venture drew the attention of New York's Grove Press, under the famed Barney Rosset. The Correct Sadist was among the last books Rosset published under his original Grove Press imprint, in 1985.