Circumcision on the Couch

The Cultural, Psychological, and Gendered Dimensions of the World's Oldest Surgery

Jordan Osserman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501368172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

An Independent Book of the Month Penises, and the things people do with them, have been subjects of controversy for a long time. This book examines how one thing that some people do to penises-remove the foreskin-has become a site upon which vital questions of gender, race, religion, sexuality, and psychic life are negotiated. While most contemporary work on the subject is concerned with whether circumcision is right or wrong, safe or harmful, Circumcision on the Couch takes as its starting point that the significance of male circumcision exceeds anatomical and juridical considerations. Deploying a feminist Lacanian framework, while drawing from a wide range of archival sources and critical thought, Jordan Osserman asks: How can psychoanalysis help us shed light on the ideologies, discourses, and fantasies surrounding circumcision and the impassioned stances for and against it? And how might the history of circumcision, in turn, allow us to re-assess and clarify how we understand the split (or "snipped") subject of psychoanalysis?

1

Freud’s Foreskin

Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Circumcision

Perhaps the most astonishing fact about circumcision is simply that it has arisen in different places across the world, and in societies that, in some cases, did not have contact with one another. Why would different groups of people independently think that the surgical removal of the foreskin—often in contexts where the risks of complications greatly outweighed any possible medical benefits—was a good idea? As the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim pointed out, even when circumcision rites can be traced to cross-cultural contact, one still wonders what makes this cultural practice compelling enough to adopt?¹ Some have offered, unconvincingly in my view, explanations grounded in evolutionary theory, suggesting that pubertal circumcision historically conferred selective advantages as it delayed the age of reproduction.² Others have highlighted important anthropological themes related to circumcision rites: birth, fertility, social initiation and affiliation, the locus of authority, the differing bodily functions of men and women, and so on. Often, such interpreters attempt to synthesize these themes to pronounce on circumcision’s overarching meaning, either for a particular society or more generally.

In this chapter, we will examine some psychoanalytic explanations of the impetus and psychic effects of circumcision, as well as the symbolic import of circumcision in Freud’s own life and work. As we wind our way through the relevant literature and consider its occasional contradictions, I will develop the following arguments: (i) circumcision is one of the ways that the biological penis is imaginarily rendered the symbolic phallus, with all of the ambiguities involved therein; (ii) acts of circumcision are fundamentally ambivalent, representing simultaneously a masculinization and feminization of the participants; and (iii) stances toward circumcision involve a preoccupation with the question of phallic mastery in the face of lack.

However, before we dive into this, I wish to introduce my theoretical framework. Inspired by Lacan’s emphasis on the way the unconscious undoes meaning, I suggest that we begin with the cut that is at the center of every act of circumcision. Before it provides anything “positive”—an identity, a medical effect, a type of knowledge—circumcision opens something up and takes something away. It does so not just anywhere on the body, but on the male organ of generation. Thus at a basic level, we can say that circumcision draws a relation between the penis and negativity. It brings the sexual organ into a system of human representation by removing something from it. It therefore takes us into the heart of the question of sexual difference and the phallus, as theorized in psychoanalysis.

Charles Shepherdson, drawing on the imagery of circumcision and other initiation rites, explains the significance of such cuts through a distinction between the organism as a purely biological phenomenon and the subjective experience of the body as acquired through representation:

In contrast to the organism, the body is constitutively denaturalized, “organ-ized” . . . by the image and the word. . . . Born as an organism, the human animal nevertheless has to acquire a body, come into the possession of its body (to be “born again,” as suggested by many rituals involving tattooing, circumcision, baptism, and so on), through the image and the signifier.³

Of course, for psychoanalysis, you do not need to be circumcised to be subjected to “the cut”—you merely need to speak. Language already tears something vital away from us. This is a fundamental trauma which, psychoanalysis maintains, demands representation. Here, I am referring to the reformulation of “castration” and “sexual difference” inaugurated by Lacan’s linguistic “return to Freud.” Lacanian psychoanalysis brings to the fore the question of how a subject comes into being in relation to others via the system of meaning-making we call language. This process involves a fundamental break from “nature” that is experienced, retroactively, as an inassimilable trauma. For Lacan, this is the ontological substrate, the ultimate “real,” of Freudian castration, and the entry into what Lacanians call “sexed” (or “divided”) subjectivity.

Circumcision, I would argue, draws our attention to embodied aspects of this phenomenon, the ways signification leaves its mark on the reproductive body. We speak, and therefore, we are governed by a logic irreducible to biology. Yet, we remain biological beings, wedded to our corporeality, dependent on the products and processes of our anatomically differentiated bodies for the continuation of life. How can we give form to the intersection of these two aspects of subjectivity, the representational and the vital? As Judith Butler writes, “Sexual difference is the site where a question concerning the relation of the biological to the cultural is posed and reposed, where it must and can be posed, but where it cannot, strictly speaking, be answered.”⁴

What Is Sexual Difference?

Although the term “sexual difference” often refers to Freudian and Lacanian theory, neither Freud nor Lacan used this particular phrase. It was produced in the Anglophone feminist appropriation of Lacan, out of the attempt to formalize psychoanalytic theory on castration, sexuality, the phallus, and the psychic “positions” of masculinity and femininity.⁵ The term is usefully polyvalent: “sexual difference” suggests both “difference between the sexes,” and the interrelation of sexuality and difference—the encounter with “difference,” or something “other” to oneself, that psychoanalysis holds to be constitutive of the (sexual) self.

For psychoanalysis, sexual identity is never straightforwardly secured. Freud theorized that the child is innately “bisexual” and “polymorphously perverse.”⁶ The acquisition of a masculine or feminine identity, and a set of sexual aims and objects, occurs through a tumultuous process of repressions and identifications, in which one’s encounter and struggle with “law” or prohibition is central. As Freud writes apropos of femininity, “psycho-analysis does not try to describe what a woman is—that would be a task it could scarcely perform—but sets about enquiring how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition.”⁷ Lacan downplayed Freud’s more maturational and developmental accounts of human sexuality—those which suggested a teleology toward heterosexual “genitality”—and foregrounded, instead, Freud’s observations regarding the sexual drive’s essential perversity, its stubborn refusal to submit to any normative schema of reproductive sexuality.⁸

Yet, against those strands of queer theory that posit a Manichean battle between the innate subversiveness of human sexuality and the oppressiveness of external social norms, psychoanalysis theorizes a subject generated through the “symbolic order,” Lacan’s name for the social world of language, intersubjective relations, and law. The unconscious subverts the societal norms and strictures placed upon sexuality only insofar as the ego has at least partially identified with these in its bid to achieve lawful belonging within the symbolic. For Lacan, this tension stems from the human need to secure meaning, to participate in a regulated symbolic system. As Jacqueline Rose writes:

Lacan’s statements on language need to be taken in two directions—towards the fixing of meaning itself (that which is enjoined on the subject), and away from that very fixing to the point of its constant slippage, the risk or vanishing-point which it always contains (the unconscious). Sexuality is placed on both these dimensions at once. The difficulty is to hold these two emphases together—sexuality in the symbolic (an ordering), sexuality as that which constantly fails.⁹

Humans are both enjoined to line themselves up in a symbolic male/female opposition and exist in permanent rebellion against this fiction. This need to secure meaning—our constitutive reliance on the symbolic order—occurs, according to Lacan, as a result of the human animal’s “premature birth.” We are born with preciously few survival instincts, in a state of total and prolonged reliance on our caregivers, yet with an unusually high capacity for imaginative thinking, leading to a “narcissistic alienation in the other’s body image.”¹⁰ An “artificial” system is needed for us to escape this narcissistic/incestuous enclosure and acquire the means to survive and reproduce the species. “Without a symbolic ‘superimposition’ on the realm of animal sexual instincts,” explains Lorenzo Chiesa, “the human Imaginary and the . . . libido would inevitably reduce us to aggressive self-destruction. . . . The Symbolic constitutes the structural condition of possibility for any sort of (reproductive) human sexual relationship to occur.”¹¹

Although this emphasis on sexual reproduction may sound suspiciously naturalistic, especially in light of Lacan’s emphasis on the nonexistence of the sexual relationship, what we are actually presented with here is an account of both the persistence of heteronormative ideology and its ultimately artificial character. As Chiesa writes, “the Symbolic may, broadly speaking, be understood as a successful ‘reaction’ against the disadaptation of man as animal.”¹² The symbolic generates the “reactionary” myths about men and women that provide the impetus for exogamous sexual relationships, yet it is not a “natural” inheritance but, rather, an artificial and constitutively malfunctioning system, into which the subject must find his own way to insert himself, and at a cost that will manifest in his psychic life. “Language is always-already there for the [child], but the symbolic relations that structurally accompany it remain utterly enigmatic,” explains Chiesa. “As a consequence, the child has to ‘learn’ how to actively enter the Other qua Symbolic, and to enter it as an individual.”¹³ We each attempt, in our own way, to participate in the myth of a harmonious sexual relationship —and thereby encounter its inherent impasses and failures.

Moreover, this imaginary fantasy of sexual complementarity is propped up by the symbolic to disguise the latter’s fundamentally abstract and even “mathematical” character. Because it is ultimately based on linguistic principles of difference and exchange, the symbolic relies on our belief in deeper sexualized meaning to sustain itself, which it was to Lacan’s credit to debunk. As Rose writes, for Lacan, “there is no longer imaginary ‘unity’ and then symbolic difference or exchange, but rather an indictment of the symbolic for the imaginary unity which its most persistent myths continue to promote.”¹⁴ Coming back to circumcision, we might therefore view its initiatory dimensions as illuminating a contradiction between human sexual anatomy and the symbolic. The cut represents both our reliance on the symbolic in order to make (re)productive use of our “natural,” sexed bodies, and the way in which the entry into symbolization cuts us away from nature in the process.

The Phallus and the Penis

What is the relationship between sexual difference in psychoanalysis and the anatomical distinction of the sexes? This question is of vital importance in relatio...