Eustache Le Sueur. La nuit de noce de Tobie et de Sara. 1640. Galería de arte.
(Freud
between Sophocles,
Abraham and Alice Miller)
Freud’s both great discoveries: infantile
sexuality and the mechanism of the unconscious, are corollary the one of the
other since the unconscious issues from the repression of the former. Sexual
mutilation being the summit of that repression, psychoanalysis brings an
essential knowledge in understanding and condemning it. However, it really challenges
it. Indeed, the trauma of his own circumcision provoked several clinical and
theoretical mistakes of Freud. So, sexual mutilation very particularly
illustrates Alice Miller's report that trauma is a main factor of
psychopathology.
We cannot quote in this short review
the reflections about sexual mutilation
of Bettelheim, Groddeck, Roheim, Lewinter, Dolto, Leboyer,
Kristeva, Miller, Nathan, Tractenberg and others. With Freud’s, their recollection would almost create a psychoanalytical
theory of sexual mutilation. We shall limit ourselves to Freud's.
I
- The clinical picture: psychoanalysis of sexual mutilation
1) Introduction: repression of autosexuality
and threat of castration
Under
one form or another, all human societies quell at various degrees infantile
sexuality: autosexuality,
in order to dominate the youth and prevent incest. Occurring before jealousy
towards the parent of the same sex, this quelling is the primary cause of repression
and may, consequently, provoke the failure of the Oedipus complex. Freud calls it
the "nuclear complex of neuroses"[1]. Then, auto-repression is all
the more intense as parental repression is accompanied by violence or threat of
violence and psychoanalytic clinic regularly reports the harm of violence set
up as educational system. Above all when this violence, exerted in the name of
the traditional lie: "It's for your own sake.", concerns the sex. Violence
is, and has been for generations, the basis of world educational systems, so
that psycho-neurosis is the most common disease. The height of that violence,
sexual mutilation must be condemned by all those who want to avoid rendering
the child psychotic, neurotic or perverse. Freud was among the first in history
to condemn it:
"... little boys hear that
the Jews have something cut off in their penis - a piece of their penis, they
think - and this gives them a right to
despise the Jews.”[2]
"... fear of castration is one of the
commonest and strangest motives for repression and thus for the formation of
neuroses. The analysis of cases in which circumcision though not, it is true,
castration, has been carried out on boys as a cure or punishment of masturbation
(a far from rare occurrence in Anglo-American society) has given our conviction
a last degree of certainty."[3]
Attacking a taboo, he handles it with kid gloves.
His condemnation is toned down; it seems aiming at the Anglo-Saxons only. Besides,
his affirmation that circumcision is a threat of castration will be posthumous[4] and
suggested by means of a footnote. But he never stated the obviousness that
circumcision is the castration of the specific organ of masculine autosexuality,
which is difficult for a circumcised to become aware of. Drawing a parallel between
circumcision and the devastating clinical effects of verbal
threats of castration that are rife in Western society, he writes in that note:
"(1) … The primaeval custom
of circumcision, another substitute for castration, can only be understood as
an expression of submission to the father's will…"
Since
the whole family, not the child, submits itself not to the father but to the
grand-father and the tyrannical societal group, this blunder testifies of
Freud's own deep circumcision trauma. Alice Miller asserts that trauma creates
paralysis, obviously partial in that opportunity, of the thought. Indeed! A
threat of castration, either verbal or acted, is particularly traumatizing. A
partial castration is at the same time a threat of total castration and a death
threat and thus a very efficient tool for submitting the child and the adult through
terror. Besides, even in non excising cultures, circumcision is indirectly a threat
of excision of girls and thus a great cause of psychological harm for them too.
2)
Circumcision: Freud's cultural bias
Freud's
creeds as for sexology testify of an ignorance that goes up to despising the
organs of autosexuality, the taboo of taboos. On one side, he qualifies the clitoris an inferior
organ:
From the one who
discovered the testicles of the male eel, this judgment of value opposed to reality
is particularly aberrant. Disparaging a unique in nature organ of pure
pleasure, the unhappy circumcised man seems very jealous. For, quite the
contrary, the clitoris is the prototype of the organ of pleasure, without any
other function since, at variance with the penis, it participates neither in
micturition nor in reproduction. Erectile, it is the phallus of woman.
Considering as inferior a merely sexual organ, present with all mammals, is
inadmissible. Freud precisely denies the reality of the fact that the clitoris
is a pure organ of pleasure. He exactly considers the specific organ of
autosexuality inferior because he considers autosexuality inferior, neurotizing
and unreasonable. So, he is a victim of the massive repression of autosexuality
of Judaic culture. That autosexuality should be neurotizing for a circumcised
is unhappy. It is not astonishing but must not be generalized. Freud's great
mistake is that he considers the phallic function, that is to say the erotic-erectile
function, as masculine:
"Taking into account
the auto-erotic and masturbatory activities, it could be set up as a thesis
that the sexuality of little girls has an entirely masculine character."[6]
Freud's sexual mutilation explains his dissymmetric,
male chauvinist conception of sexuality. His statement according to which the
little girl would suffer from being deprived of penis seems to be the
projection upon woman of his own unconscious envy of vagina.
On the other side, like all
circumcised in infancy, Freud disregards
the reality and feminine nature of the foreskin.
"A
man, after all, only has one leading sexual zone, one sexual organ, whereas
woman has two: the vagina – the female proper organ – and the clitoris, which
is analogous to the male organ."[7]
as
if the foreskin did not have a certain functional symmetry with the clitoris in
autosexuality, including the isolated and indefinitely repetitive orgasmic
contractions, similar to clitoral orgasms, that a circumcised cannot know.
Those who do not own a foreskin cannot guess its value of second sexual organ
of man, a very handy and erogenous pocket mini-vagina.
3)
Claude Olievenstein's case
In an autobiographic
chapter where he does not speak once of circumcision but that abounds in
unconscious references to it, the psychiatrist Olievenstein also
provides us a magnificent example:
"Adult paranoia begins, it
seems to me, very early in infancy, right after leaving the maternal womb."[9]
–
eight days later indeed!
4)
Anna Freud's case
Making autosexuality
guilty, Freud's own daughter, at least in her adolescence, was the victim of
his wrong theory according
to which autosexuality would be neurotizing and should be fought.
She wrote the inventor of infantile sexuality that she struggled against her
own tendency to autosexuality(!)[10].
II
– Practice and theory: sexual mutilation of psychoanalysis
1)
Practice
Freud committed a grave mistake in
the analysis of his most famous patient: the Wolf-Man. The day when the young
boy played with his penis in front of her beloved maid, the latter scolded him:
"Children who do that get a wound in that place." Uttered with a
harsh tone, it is a malicious forecast accompanied by a threat of loss of love,
and thus exclusion. But Freud interprets it as a threat of castration. This projection
of Freud’s own circumcision trauma had a negative incidence on the course of
the patient's analysis.
2)
Ethnological theories
In his two complementary anthropological
theories about circumcision, dating from 1916 and 1936, Freud appears clumsy
and shy.
His 1916 theory, reaffirmed in 1933,
is apologetic of circumcision; he presents it as a progress by comparison with
castration, without proof that castration existed before:
"It seems indubitable to me
that circumcision…, is an equivalent of castration and comes to take over
it."[11]
It is very likely that, in ancient
times, circumcision, castration and complete human sacrifice existed,
altogether or separately, depending on the society. Only the disappearance of
all these acts of barbarity constitutes progress.
The same accounts for his 1936
theory which he reproduced in his above mentioned and commented posthumous work:
"... whoever accepted that
symbol (circumcision) was showing by it that he was prepared to submit to the
father's will... "[12]
At last, Freud should have
formulated the psycho-sociologic theory of infantile sexual mutilation amongst
primitives of polygamous societies as prevention of incest through threat of
castration (for boys) or death (for boys and girls).
3)
Freud's denaturation of Sophocles's Oedipus
The main cultural flaw provoked in
Freudian theory by circumcision lies in a view of the Oedipus complex that misrepresents,
through weakening it, Sophocles's myth. Roheim
was the first to point out that the separation-of-the-mother /
submission-to-the-father rituals of primitives distort the Oedipus complex:
"... the superabundance of
ritual dealing with this theme (orality) is a camouflage of the Oedipus
complex."[13]
This
remark very obviously applies to circumcision. However, Freud interprets
Oedipus's blinding as a castration:
"Castration and blinding
which substitutes to it are the punishment..."[14]
This is wrong. With Sophocles, warned by the oracle, the
father tries to kill his son through abandoning him in nature. Therefore, interpreting
Oedipus's auto-punishment as a castration, which is not murder, is totally
fanciful. Freud projected upon Sophocles's myth the threat of castration of
circumcision, extremely vivid since consisting in a beginning of realization. For
Sophocles, Oedipus's blinding only symbolizes his ignorance, his
"blindness", his unconsciousness when he killed his father and
married his mother, a double blindness thus (one eye for dad, one eye for mum).
The fact that Freud transformed that metaphor into a matter of castration is
the height of... his own blindness, stemming from the anguish and castration
fantasies of a circumcised. In Sophocles's scenario, the paternal punishment is
death, which is the normal unconscious fantasy: desire to kill the father in
order to marry one's mother / fear of being killed by him. Therefore, Freud
projected the very Judaic idea of punishment by castration rather than through
death upon the Hellenistic myth. A victim of the trauma of his own
circumcision, he misrepresented, warped according to Roheim's word, Sophocles's
Oedipus. Sophocles, not Freud, invented the unconscious and the Oedipus
complex. Freud invented the science of deciphering the
unconscious, which is quite another thing.
The
consequence of this cultural bias is a grave theoretical error that flaws psychoanalytical
theory and practice: Freud substitutes an inexistent "castration
complex", which he improperly integrates into the Oedipus complex, for
common fantasies of castration.
For
those who have not been traumatized by a sexual mutilation, at the age of
sexual impulse for the parent of the opposite sex and jealousy towards the
other, the threat imagined by the child facing her or his desires concerning the
parental couple, is not castration but death through exclusion of the family.
Freud very sensibly formulated this for girls but very foolishly not for boys!
In cultures practising circumcision,
the Oedipus complex, the time of integration into society, is altered. A real
castration threat substitutes itself for the imaginary fear of death resulting
from the unconscious desire to kill the parent of the same sex. But the correct
resolution of the Oedipus complex cannot result from physical injury (or threat
of injury) by others. Quite the opposite, a positive or negative emphasis on
whatever part of the body, by real or verbal violence from the social group, is
unacceptable meddling of the
lawmaker into family life and into the development of
the individual, a source of mass psychopathology. This
affirmation was shockingly illustrated in Israel where a court decision,
happily quashed in appeal, condemned a mother to a high penalty on daily basis
as long as she would not have had her son circumcised.
The circumcised, or those who have
been threatened by castration, may find a way out and may believe in a
lessening in their favour of the universal Law. There is nothing like circumcision
or actual threat of castration to pervert a child. Doubting the acts or words
of their progenitors is hard for them. They are naturally led to boast, with a
wealth of arguments, about their deeds or misdeeds, including those against
themselves. Once adults, things that seem to have always existed look natural
to them, they will reproduce them.
The
circumcised thus risk making an absurd alibi of their disability. A partial castration
brings them the comfort of a sign of "identification" placing them
above women and the common herd. As if a mutilation
could enable to leave
(or... not to leave) infancy behind! No only other men, “foreigners”, are
intimately considered to be despicable, dirty and untouchable without one being
contaminated. But above all, it would be unthinkable that they would marry
their daughter or sister. Racist endogamy and possession of women certainly are
one of the aims of the operation. Circumcision is also a sign of belonging to a
violent – and therefore assumed powerful – community. Allegedly more reliable
than identity documents, this particular sign becomes the paradigm of the narcissism of
groups that exclude themselves from of the universal community and discriminate
the latter. This means of "identification" (mixed up with belonging)
forever puts its holders in a caste: “the elected”, which may think that
everything is allowed (stoning, excision, forcing into marriage, polygamy,...
etc.) or owed to it (the Promised Land). Therefore, through a violent action
into the unconscious and the powerful affective world, it is a perverse technique
of enrolment of the individual into a brutal society. It reinforces division of
the world into rival groups indulging in merciless wars.
Conclusion
Circastration is the chain and ball
at the feet of psychoanalysis that prevents Freud's message to be heard. On the
one hand, Roheim himself did not draw the consequence of his masterly
observation that sexual mutilation is likely to provoke the failure of the
Oedipus complex, on the other hand, "castration" of woman is not an
operative concept. At the contrary, Lacan jumped over the idea of symbolical
castration in order, as demonstrated by Elisabeth Roudinesco[15],
to make a fortune through operating the "castration" of the wallet of
his customers by inventing short sessions with delirious fees. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis
brings an aetiology, prevention and treatment of mental disease. Overcoming its
flaws due to its founder’s sexual mutilation, which assumes a deep restoration,
will enable it to do it better in the future. It stigmatizes sexual mutilation as
an expression of the domination drive through sadistic and paedophobic
fantasies. This drive is strongly strengthened by the denial of the reality of
the loss and therefore of the crime. Psychoanalysis brings humanity first a scientific
method of decoding the unconscious that enables to find out in each individual
case the sequence of circumstances of the trauma, a prerequisite to healing, then,
the dynamic of an ethics that concern both the development of the child and
socio-politic. The barbarity of feminine and masculine excisions issues from
infectious moral disorder that drives circumcised individuals and even noncircumcised
peoples towards the "moral order". It must be abolished as soon as
possible.
Related
articles:
-
Sexual mutilation and the moral order
- La
circoncision, une dangereuse folie collective
Sigismond (Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau) –
oldsigismund@hotmail.com
Independent psychoanalysis
researcher, a former pupil of the Psychoanalysis department of Paris VIII
University, author of "Feminine and masculine sexual mutilation, the greatest
crime against humanity", available for free at: independent.academia.edu.
This text was
the matter of a lecture pronounced 4th September 2008 in the University
of Keele (UK), at the 10th international symposium of NOCIRC, organized
with NORM-UK and the school of law of the university. It is published on the
site of the Institut européen de psychanalyse et travail social : psychassoc.com
and has been quoted by Jean-Pierre Rosenczveig.
[1] The rat man. 1909.
London: The Hogarth press; 1955. S.E., X., p. 208, n., 2nd §.
[2] Analysis of a phobia on a
five-years-old boy (Little Hans). 1909. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1955. S.E., X, p. 36, n.
[3] New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. 1933. London: The Hogarth
press ltd.; 1964. S.E., XXII, p. 86.
[4] Freud S. An outline of psychoanalysis. 1938. London: The Hogarth press
ltd.; 1964. S.E., XXII, p. 190.
[5] Fetichism. 1927. p. 157.
[9] L’homme parano. Odile Jacob ; 1992. p. 43.
[10] Correspondance
Sigmund Freud – Anna Freud, 1904 – 1938. Paris : Fayard ; 2012. Préface
d'Elisabeth Roudinesco, p. 15.
[11] Introductory lessons to psychoanalysis. 1916-17. London: The Hogarth
press; 1961. S.E., XV, 164.
[12] Moses and monotheism. 1936. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1964. S.E.,
XXIII, p.122.
[13] Psychoanalysis and anthropology. New York:
International university press; 1950. p. 149-150.
[14] Totem and taboo. 1912. London: The Hogarth press limited; 1964. S.E.
XIII, p. 130.
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