Circumcision provokes systemic and reciprocal paranoia and racism
Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau (auteur)
At home Socio-psychoanalysis and sexual mutilation researcher, psycho-historian
"I have felt for a long time that circumcision is at the root of this obsession of finding enemies beneath each and every stone." Gabriella Ortiz-Monasterio
Having relived the trauma of his circumcision during his analysis, Leboyer is one of the rare persons to have become aware of the paranoia created by the trauma of circumcision.
"How could a being who has been aggressed in this way, while totally helpless, develop into a relaxed, loving, trusting person? Indeed he will never be able to trust anyone in life, he will always be on the defensive, unable to open up to others and to life."1
We saw that Roudinesco denatured Freud’s categorical stand against Zionist racism and fanaticism2 that, in a prophetic way, he considered responsible for the rise of Islamism. But his letter to pregnant Sabina Spielrein shows that he speaks a double language depending on whether he is in private or in public and whether he refers to Christians or Muslims (his brothers in circumcision):
"... if your child is a boy... He must be brown-haired or, in any case, become so; no more fair-haired head. We are and we remain Jews; the others will never get beyond using us without ever understanding or respecting us."3
And if it is a girl?! After Spielrein despicable seduction by her analyst Jung and her split with him, that openly sexist and racist injunction (Freud’s racism founds itself on the colour of the hair, not on the circumcision status) is fiery of suffering from antiJew racism and communitarian blindness. The latter is characterized by a heavily paranoid and megalomaniac generalization and certainty: "The others will never...". They might offend some Justs. We must add that Freud's choice of words, still in private, is sometimes racist; he once used the word "goyim", xenophobic, scornful and insulting, to designate foreigners to Jewishness and used the xenophobic expression "elected people":
"… my intention to melt together Jews and goyim at the service of psychoanalysis… "4
"Presently, my only joy is the capture of Jerusalem and the experience that the English attempt with the elected people."5
Conversely, that declaration to Spielrein must be brought together with this one, public and a few years earlier:
"... 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." 6
The contradiction is great between the affirmation of the despicable character of circumcision, which Freud thinks is a barbarous custom inherited from a primitively practised castration, and the bitterness of thinking that non-Jews would be unable to understand and respect the Jews to only use them and treat them as objects, which is precisely what circumcision does to children. That does not leave any room for the Justs who understand and respect the Jews while considering them sick of the collective madness that tortures and mutilates children.
Bonomi reminded us that, like Freud's sons, “little Hans” was not circumcised7. However, Freud advised Max Graf, his father, to breed him within Judaism (according to Haddad, Lacan thought that that included circumcision, which, from Freud, is impossible). Spielrein, one of the first psychoanalysts of children, could not ignore the condemnation of circumcision by Freud8 and the latter’s incitement to communitarianism certainly does not include masculine sexual mutilation. But Freud was unable to imitate the German 19th-century reform rabbis to found a Jewish movement against circumcision with psychoanalysts. We must think that his motive is economic: not to cut himself from possible neurotic Jewish customers, like all psychoanalysts do today, with rare exceptions (Bettelheim, Dolto, Miller, Reich, Spitz, Szazs, This) who practise the omerta on circumcision.
That anti-Christian fantasy might indicate a resurgence of the trauma of circumcision in the analyst who attributed antiJewism to circumcision, as Spinoza had done:
“… the Jews having lived apart from all nations in such a way that they incurred universal hatred, and this not only by observing exterior rites contrary to those of other nations but by the sign of circumcision…”9.
Repression of infantile sexuality – sexual mutilation is the worst of it – is the fundamental cause of paranoia (cf. our writings "For autosexuality"10, “Circumcision and paranoia, the Olievenstein case"11), for its victims as for their intact neighbours. Contrary to what Freud thinks, the repression of homophilia is only an outcome of that primary cause. An enquiry on a hundred far-right students12 showed that circumcision is one of the causes of their hatred of the Jews. That paranoia is not symmetrical between intacts and circumciseds; on the one hand, a part of the latter suffers from post-traumatic stress disorders that make it more acute, on the other hand, the collective, sexist and religious character of male sexual mutilation gives it a cultural justification that increases it tenfold by a group narcissism. Moreover, a double syndrome of collective madness accompanies the paranoia of circumcised peoples (cf. our writing Sexual mutilation, a dangerous cultural alienation: a Münchhausen syndrome by proxy and an aggravated since collective Stockholm syndrome).
Olievensteinwrote on that topic:
"Collective delirious episodes or acute attacks of paranoia occur in every society, according to circumstances, with a part of truth and a part of madness (what is exact or fantasized in the Israeli refusal of dialogue with Arabs?)"
and, a little further:
"The less the individuals have possibilities to differentiate between each other, whilst (that is fundamental) they keep a feeling of belonging, the less they will be able to react to the installation of collective madness, above all if it justifies a great collective destiny in rational and especially emotional terms.",
Circumcision does not allow differentiating oneself, on the contrary:
"... the paranoid society has the imperious need to make up autopunitive mechanisms."
Circumcision is the worst of those mechanisms.
"The delirium is maintained... by a series of initiation rituals and locks of progression into the social scale. May it be the auto-da-fé or the court of Inquisition, the rite has an obscure, unhealthy side that more or less unveils the sexual part behind the mechanisms set in motion... That eroticisation of acting-outs allows the chief and its regulars not to give in nor let the heated state of the masses be disarmed."13
That last condemnation almost explicitly aims at circumcision.
The paranoid symptoms of certainty, megalomania and querulousness are systematically present in circumcising communities.
The delusional, megalomaniac certainty is firmly anchored in the mind by the religious creed of the moral superiority that circumcision would provide; the rabbis even see sanctity in it. Instead of facing temptation, that hypocrite sanctity, imposed on babies by the torture of the knife, imagines itself less tempted but discriminates against children, the community and the rest of humanity. That alleged sanctity is often accompanied by contempt, and, in the worst cases, repulsion for women, and even paedophilia, when it does not indulge, in a position of strength, in a compulsion to rape exacerbated by an unconscious feeling of vengeance against the mother accomplice of the ritual pedocriminality14, cf. Strauss-Kahn, Weinstein, Epstein, Polansky, Hamilton, Ramadan, etc... It bursts out in the invading temperament of peoples of circumciseds that systematically backs itself upon religious delirium: Palestine for Zionists, the whole world for Islamists.
Querulousness is expressed in the as delusional as massive and collective claim for a right to circumcise children. It denies the rights of the child not to be tortured, to physical integrity and to religious freedom. It systematically goes to the outcry each time that that alleged right is challenged (Northern Europe countries, Germany notably). A strange mistake of two famous psychoanalysts testified to it at the time of the outcry against the 2012 decision of the court of K?ln that ended circumcision in Germany for six months, till the law eventually authorized it. In spite of Judge Jean-Pierre Rosenczveig’s stand, Eliacheff and Winter joined that outcry ascribing Lacan to approve circumcision in a passage where, on the contrary, he denigrates it with an irony tinted with bitterness15.
Denial is obvious in the widely-spread belief that circumcision is not mutilation. It showed when, face to face, I affirmed to Haddad and Roudinesco that circumcision is a threat of castration; their first reaction was denial. Of course, I was wrong to speak of a threat of castration when the matter is eviration, which is much more serious since eviration implies the loss of pleasure. That denial is present in Freud’s belief that circumcision would be a survival of castration, whereas it was not castration but the eviration of eunuchs that was practised till the 19th century. Unconsciously and very logically, Freud prefers the loss of the function of reproduction to that of pleasure.
Paranoid delirium is the worst of those symptoms. The Zionist fanaticism stigmatized by Freud results in the martyrdom of the Palestinians. We sometimes hear the delirious assertion that the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis would justify Zionism (cf. Roudinesco).
A major element of that paranoia is the unconscious compulsion of vengeance generated by circumcision. We could spot it in two leading cases: the singers Leonard Cohen and Morice Benin16. That compulsion is systematically exerted on neighbouring ethnic groups and explains the tendency to genocide (the first ones in history are described in the Book of Joshua). There is never genocide between intacts; all are committed in the presence of circumcision on one side or the other and sometimes both sides17. Unable to incriminate the authors of their mutilation, the sexually mutilated shift that compulsion towards other people, women most notably18.
"Belonging is a self-evident, intimate conviction. Imposing it on someone is denying their ability to define themselves freely." Fatou Diome
“We refuse to be what you wanted us to be, we are what we are.” Bob Marley
There is no symmetry between circumciseds and intacts; the latter legitimately loathe the crime against humanity of circumcision and its discriminatory eugenics. Circumcision rapes (juridically speaking according to articles 222-23 and 222-26 of the French criminal code) the physical integrity of the child.
An important trend of contemporary juridical thought worked out on the right of the child to that integrity. Article 3, 2, b, of the Chart of fundamental rights of the European Union19 (December 7, 2000), strictly opposes customary sexual mutilation; it strictly forbids “eugenic practices, notably those aiming at the selection of persons”. June 14, 2013, in La Sorbonne, opening the founding meeting of "Excision, parlons-en", Mrs Christine Lazerges, the president of the French national consultative commission of human rights (CNCDH), declared that feminine and masculine sexual mutilation is discriminatory. On October 1st, 2013, the Parliamentary Assembly of the European community took a resolution condemning circumcision as well as excision. In 2021, for the first time in history, a candidate for the French presidency included in her programme, in the chapter “FIGHTING AGAINST ALL FORMS OF DISCRIMINATION”: “Children go on being the victims of violence. Notably, concerning female genital mutilation, circumcision of young boys for religious motive...”. We are in the presence of an open dispute between culture (religion, tradition and folklore) and discrimination. A few weeks later, likely the victim of intimidation from the religious, Mrs Rousseau first rubbed that sentence off from her programme, then, after my publication on Twitter of the open letter of Droit au corps20 asking her about the motive of that removal. Mrs Rousseau did not answer. We must think that she deleted all traces of her stand to avoid the risk of jeopardizing her political career by losing Jewish and Muslim votes and even enduring accusations of racism.
The discriminatory character of circumcision is above all condemnable. Maimonides rigorously exposed it as soon as the twelfth century. He shrewdly begins by sending fanatics to sleep by combining circumcision with the notion of the unity of God. That paradoxical coming together masks the stigmatization of circumcision, on the one hand, as discriminating against the community and the rest of humanity:
“It is my opinion that circumcision has another important motive: it makes that those who profess that idea of the unity of God distinguish themselves by the same body sign which is imprinted on them all, so that the one who is not part of them cannot, being a stranger, pretend to belong to them.”
on the other hand, as worse than ordinary racism because accompanied by a pretence of moral superiority:
“This commandment has not been prescribed to correct a physical deficiency but a moral one.”21
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Freud published his most elaborate thought about circumcision only one year before his death and by allusion. Without using the term paranoia, it comes close to it and testifies to an awareness he did not have in 1913:
"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."22
The allusion to circumcision in the footnote discreetly suggests, in a way biased by the false theory of submission to the father, that circumcision is one of those destructuring threats:
"(1) … The primaeval custom of circumcision, another substitute for castration, can only be understood as an expression of submission to the father's will… " (p. 190)
Actually, there is no submission to the father but submission of the latter to society, notably the grandparents (fear of disinheritance), the religious and the puritan tradition that presses the reprobation of an against-nature morality on autosexuality.
That thought describes the acute paranoia provoked by sexual mutilation. It leaves out that repression of autosexuality (circumcision being an extreme form of that repression) and all kind of trauma may have the same outcome. It joins Leboyer’s to apply to Freud himself. He had a paranoid personality; his gross projection of circumcised including an eviration-threat into the Oedipus complex testifies to it (cf.23). Besides, it must be read in conjunction with that statement, which clearly situates circumcision as a collective madness:
"… among the customs by which the Jews made themselves separate, that of circumcision has made a disagreeable, uncanny (unheimlich) impression, which is to be explained, no doubt, by its recalling the dreaded castration..." from 24
In psychosis, affirmed Lacan, the unconscious is open sky down. Then, precisely, the unconscious ignores contradiction and does not back down from affirming one thing and its contrary. So, in 1935, Freud will affirm with great gullibility:
"As long as the Jews will not be admitted in Christian circles…"25
A weird ambition for an atheist.
The inventor of infantile sexuality very obviously suffered from the savage repression of it that he endured at the time of his circumcision. The trauma created by that repression did not only remain forever engraved upon his body. It was also inscribed in his unconscious, in an amnesied way, but several of his dreams-nightmares testify to it26. That repression is a deep cause for individual paranoia, powerfully magnified by collective paranoia when sexual mutilation strikes the whole social group. Freud condemned Zionism as racist. Therefore, he was not racist against Arabs, his brothers in circumcision. But his paranoia accuses the whole of Christians of persecution against the Jews.
Circumcision creates a chasm or reciprocal paranoia between circumcised and intacts. That chasm is all the deeper as it is based on an infantile, blind creed in equivalence between wisdom and parental authority. Confident and loving children quickly forgive their parents (Stockholm syndrome). It remains that paranoia does not only affect fundamentalists and terrorists; it also rages with many intellectuals and psychoanalysts.
2 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. A communitarian victim of circumcision, Roudinesco betrays Freud's thought; he always disengaged from Zionism in Palestine.
3 Freud S. August 1913 letter to Sabina Spielrein.
4 Freud S. 1912 letter to Ferenczi.
5 Freud S. 10.12.1917 letter to Abraham. Freud Sigmund – Abraham Karl correspondance 1907-1926, Paris : Gallimard ; 1969, p. 268.
6 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.
7 Bonomi C. Introduction to The cut and the building of psychoanalysis, Volume 1. Routledge; 2015. p. 5.
8 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. Freud and circumcision, a chronicle of an unconscious trauma.
9 Spinoza B. Politico-theological treatise. 1670. 3: 99.
10 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. (95) (DOC) For autosexuality | Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau – Academia.edu
11 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. Circumcision and paranoia, the Olievenstein case
12 Frenkel-Brunswik E., Nevitt R. Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, 1946.
13 Olievenstein C. L'homme parano. Odile Jacob. 1992. p. 104 s.
14 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. Honour crime, stoning, forced marriage, rape, polygamy, excision, dry sex, forced obesity, veil and circumcision, causality and correlation
15 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. (DOC) Victims of the circumcising communitarianism, éliacheff and Winter betray Freud and denature Lacan (updated 09.02.2021) | Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau - Academia.edu
16 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. (DOC) Circumcision and traumatic amnesia, Leonard Cohen "avenges" on his father, Morice Benin on his mother, Jean-Jacques Goldman gets out better (updated 12.18.2021) | Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau – Academia.edu
17 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. Genocide and circumcision, causality and near absolute correlation?
18 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. Honour crime, stoning, forced marriage, rape, polygamy, excision, dry sex, forced obesity, veil and circumcision, causality and correlation
21 Maimonides M. The guide of the perplexed. 1160. Chicago: Chicago University press; 1963. p. 609.
22 An outline of psychoanalysis. 1938. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1964. S.E., XXII, p. 189-191.
23 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. "Oedipus without complex"... of castration! (as blind as Oedipus, Freud distorts Sophocles' myth)
24 Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. 1910. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1957. S.E., XI. p. 95, n. 2.
25 Freud S. 1935 letter to Joseph Wortis.
26 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. Five dreams of Freud testify to his circumcision trauma.