Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Circumcision, A Dangerous Collective Madness

The extreme seriousness of this syndrome comes from the fact that it is perpetrated upon the child.

Sigmund Freud in Austria; he established sexual drives as the primary motivational forces of human life. Photo: Greenlanternpress.com

(PARIS, France) - A recent advance in psychiatric criminology is interested in the perpetrators of sexual mutilation. It diagnoses a transgenerational and collective Münchhausen syndrome by proxy^[1],^[2]. Strongly united by ethnic complicity, the criminals acquire honour, illusory glory, power, empathy of the group and ethnic superiority.

This not only from the mutilation inflicted upon their victims but also from that they themselves endured from their own parents. Indeed, they consider it beneficial. This gives this syndrome an exceptional strength, a particularly fierce compulsion of repetition, backed by a massive denial of the reality of the endured loss and reinforced by the collective character of the aggression.

Normally a simple distinguishing feature, mutilation is magnified as a sign of collective identity that is impossible to question without provoking an outcry. The extreme seriousness of this syndrome comes from the fact that it is perpetrated upon the child.

In the common Münchhausen syndrome, abusers conceal their crime. But as soon as the syndrome becomes collective, criminal concealment reverses into public display of the received and inflicted mutilation. The latter is negated as such; the abusers boast and it becomes a symbol of their collective identity that discriminates them from foreigners.

Similarly, the compulsion to consult the doctor, banal in the ordinary Münchhausen, does not exist in ritual sexual mutilation. Here, religion and tradition take the place of medical authority. The traditional values of respect for human nature are totally inverted in the name of a hastily baptized cultural fanaticism. Sexual mutilation then becomes second nature: an obscene, abhorrent and inhuman "normality". We are in the presence of a collective madness.

The great criticism of this seductive psychiatric description is that, unlike psychoanalysis, it sees things from outside. It reports and exposes an exacerbated narcissism without seeing its deep cause. For it passes off the essence of the phenomenon: compulsion of domination over the individual and other groups, characterized by a mutilating torture that puts the minor under terror, for life.

For the psychoanalyst, the matter is reversal into the contrary of the forbidden sexual pleasure (autosexuality). The right to the latter is only acquired through a monstrous sacrifice, and lessened (men) or transformed into pain (women). All this is necessary to merit love and esteem of the parents, society and the divinity. Sexual mutilation directly hits the decreed guilty organ. This for the greatest satisfaction of the neurotic, made guilty and making guilty perpetrators.

The most extraordinary symptom of sexual mutilation

Psychoanalysis brings to light a peculiar symptom of sexual mutilation. It allows to decipher a particularity of Biblical Hebrew. Indeed, a same term (שפה) designates the lips and the tongue, as if the latter were part of the lips and vice-versa, as if the tongue did not have two functions: taste and elocution, that the lips do not have. Besides, the envelope of the tongue is not the lips but the whole mouth. On the other hand, it is true that man's major erogenous zone is continuous from the glans to the outer foreskin.

We are in the presence of the most formidable symptom of the history of psychoanalysis: a flaw, an astonishing lack in the Hebraic language. That the latter should not distinguish two as different in their form and function organs results from a pathologic, typically Freudian emotiono-mental displacement. That shift is operated through a metaphor that testifies, in the oral zone, of the reality slaughtered by circumcision in the sexual parts.

The implicit comparison between on the one hand, the lips and the tongue, on the other hand, the glans and the foreskin, shows that this symptom results from the engraving within the mind of the trauma endured at the end of the penis. The collective symptom denounces the crime against humanity. That metaphor is doubled by a metonymy; the content: the tongue, is likened to the container: the lips. That weird metonymy is utterly denunciatory.

Modern Hebrew gets round the problem in a telling way; it preserves the root but puts it into the feminine for the lips and the masculine for the tongue. But since what is true for the glans is not so for the tongue, it did not suppress the symptom but made it a neurotic one. However, for a hyperactive and catching minority, psychosis is still there.

That a monstrous mass criminality against children should end in such a disorder is not astonishing. If "the word is the murder of the thing" (Lacan), the reverse is confirmed in that example.

The madness of ritual mutilation and the trauma that it generates have provoked a gap in the language, and the alleged superiority an obvious weakness. The absence in Hebrew of what Lacan would call a "significant" constitutes a removing of a term that lacks in the language of a whole people.

This is an extraordinary symptom of collective psychosis; the repressed or removed from the real of the sex comes back into the real of the language. So, we have established the psychotic nature of the collective trauma provoked by circumcision at birth. The latter is dangerous, it may drive one mad, collectively mad (cf. the first genocide in history: Jericho), which we stressed through establishing the strong existing correlation between violence and circumcision: http://circabolition.multiply.com/journal/item/344/Genocides_wars_the_death_penalty_excision_rape_and_circumcision

Freud notes:

"The hypothesis that a root of those hatreds of the Jews (Judenhasses) which occur in such primary ways and lead to such irrational behaviour among the nations of the West, must be sought here too, seems inescapable to me. Circumcision is unconsciously equated with castration."^[3]

Alice Miller outbids:

"Ritual practices of circumcision and excision have effects that reach not only the individual and their descendants but also other men."^[4]

The consequences of that reciprocal racism are dramatic. On the one hand, conflicts are multiplied, on the other hand, wars between circumcised or between circumcised and intact sometimes degenerate into genocide; out of the twelve genocides of modern times: Congo, Hereros, Armenia, Jews, Gipsies, Biafra, Bengal, Hutus, Tutsis, Kurds, Bosnia, Darfur, only one did not imply circumcised on one side or the other.

Three implied circumcised on both sides. And in six of them, circumcised were the perpetrators. Between 1996 and 2002, but for one civil war (Sri Lanka), all wars involved at least one circumcising country and they were more than three times more numerous in circumcising countries.

The death penalty is more than twice more frequent in them. Torture is more widespread in them. In Norway, 60% of the rapes are committed by 2% of the population who are circumcised. cf "Genocides, wars, the death penalty, excision, rape, and circumcision" (cf. the link here above).

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^[1] Meadow, Roy. Münchhausen Syndrome by Proxy: The Hinterland of Child Abuse. Lancet 1977 (310), 343–5. http://web.tiscali.it/humanrights/articles/meadow77.html

^[2] Matteoli R. Blood Ritual, the Münchhausen complex. Nunzio press; 2008.

^[3] Moses and monotheism. 1936. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1964. S.E., XXIII, p. 91.

^[4] Banished knowledge - Facing childhood injuries. New York: Anchor press; 1997. Chap VII.

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Michel Hervé Navoiseau-Bertaux (Sigismond) is the author of "Sexual mutilation: excision, circumcision, the victims' point of view", for free at circabolition.multiply.com; he is an Independent psychoanalysis researcher (Chercheur indépendant en psychanalyse) based in Paris, France, who works with Salem-News.com to help raise awareness of the massive societal problems connected to the blindly accepted, mutilating practice of circumcision. He says, "Non violence is as fundamental as violence, love and hatred, justice and injustice. But power is at the tip of the tongue and the sweet violence of speech, if one takes hold of it, can silence weapons."

(La non violence est aussi fondamentale que la violence, l'amour et la haine, le juste et l'injuste. Mais le pouvoir est au bout de la langue et la douce violence de la parole, si l'on s'en empare, peut faire taire les armes.)