A Note on the Phallic Significance of the Tongue and of Speech

That the tongue may be treated as a symbol for the penis has been clearly demonstrated by Ernest Jones, 1 who has also shown—with the help of rich illustrative material—that speech may serve as a sublimation of sexual interests; the interests concerned in this sublimation being primarily anal-erotic in origin, though linked to genital trends by way of the 'infantile sexual theory' of gaseous fertilization. In this note I wish to draw attention to a few additional cases selected from the very numerous ethnological and mythological instances which reveal the close psychological connection between tongue and penis and between speech and sexual power. As might be anticipated, these cases (which are for the most part taken from Frazer's rich collections of anthropological data) very frequently reveal the double attitude towards the penis with which psycho-analysts are so familiar in their daily work: on the one hand joy and pride in the possession and use of the organ, on the other hand fear of its loss or forcible removal (castration complex). Reference to the situations and attitudes connected with the (Oedipus complex is also, as we might expect, fairly common.

The unconscious equations, speech = sexual power, dumbness = castration or impotence, are clearly shown in the numerous customs connected with the cutting out of tongues. Excision of the tongue would appear to have been practised occasionally as a form of punishment at the same time as there were practised other punishments easily recognizable as castration-displacements, such as blinding and the cutting off of hands (as well as actual castration itself). In England, for example, this form of punishment, along with other mutilations, seems to have been not uncommon. Thus one historian of crime tells us that 'men branded on the forehead, without hands, feet or tongues, lived as examples of the danger which attended the commission of petty crimes and as a warning to all churls'.2 The tongues of animals