"Female and male sexual mutilation, the greatest crime against humanity."
- "Yes, it is true!" Alain de Mijolla (psychoanalyst)
"Circumcision is intended to protect those concerned." Simone Veil
When I declared to Elisabeth Roudinesco and Gérard Haddad that circumcision is a threat of castration, they immediately denied it; I had to remind them of the following statement by Freud who, besides, only suggests it by a footnote:
"The results of the threat of castration are multifarious and incalculable; they affect the whole of a boy's relations with his father and mother and subsequently with men and women in general."1.
"(1) … The primaeval custom of circumcision, another substitute for castration, can only be understood as an expression of submission to the father's will… " footnote p. 190
A great mistake by Freud, throughout his work, was to imagine that the primitive father would have practised castration as a punishment and that circumcision would be a survival of it. That is missing the point. For in circumcising cultures, it was not castration but the eviration of harem keepers that was practised. Under the family roof, circumcision was an eviration threat to the sons who might desire the father's wives. Harems have disappeared, but circumcision remains and is still a threat of eviration. By speaking of the threat of castration, Freud erases half of the thing. Castration concerns the capacity to reproduce, while eviration also concerns pleasure, the capacity to enjoy and to make others enjoy, and thus to be desired.
We must add to that thought that the fact that the unconscious threat provoked by the trauma of circumcision has a character of group narcissism; circumcision is a crime, but ritual circumcision is committed by whole peoples. A nationalist and endogamic crime against a social group: minors, it is a crime against humanity. But it is not any crime against humanity; perpetrated on minors, it is the greatest crime against humanity.
Circumcision generates a terrible trauma, the most often unconscious, ignored and minimized. Of course, that trauma is present in the victims of circumcision, but it also exists in the rest of humanity; the mere presence of circumcision weighs upon the whole world. The consequence is the high propensity for violence, on the one hand, with circumcising peoples: terrorism2, multiplication of wars3, violence against women4, on the other hand, the conflicts in the presence of circumcision are likely to degenerate into genocides5.
1Freud S. An outline of psychoanalysis. 1938. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1964. S.E., XXII, p. 189-191
2 Terrorism and circumcision, high correlation and psychoanalytical causality (Circumcised first, then fanaticized, circumcision makes men weapons of war) (updated 12.25.2021) | Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau – Academia.edu
3 Violence and circumcision: genocides, wars, terrorism, rape, the death penalty, excision (updated 01.23.2022) | Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau – Academia.edu
4 Circumcision and feminicide, honour crime, stoning, excision, rape, harems, polygamy, forced marriage, forced obesity, dry sex, veil, causality and correlation (updated 11.02.2021) | Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau - Academia.edu
5 Genocide and circumcision, quasi-absolute correlation and psychoanalytical causality (updated 04.16.2022) | Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau – Academia.edu