The Voice as (Female) Phallus

Two facts in regard to the human voice are noteworthy. First, the quality and especially the pitch of the voice as a function of the sex of the individual, constituting one of the major secondary sex characters; the effect of prepubertal castration in this respect is well known. Second and equally familiar is the rôle of the voice as a sensitive reflector of emotional states; its modulation and modification as the often quite involuntary expression of emotional nuances—of which, too, the subject may be more or less unaware—is a matter of daily experience. On a larger scale, it is not surprising, therefore, that disturbances of the voice and of voice production should occur not infrequently as the outward manifestation of emotional conflict—as a symptom of neurosis, in short. Indeed, vocal functioning seems to lend itself to becoming the locus of conversion processes with a facility surpassed in this respect only in the case of the gastrointestinal tract; such a conversion may result, in massive form, in the hysterical aphonia and mutism rather often encountered for example in the so called war neuroses, or, at the other extreme, in the more or less subtle changes in timbre which may on occasion be the reflection of unconscious conflict. It is surely noteworthy that the two groups of phenomena, somatic and psychological, referred to above should find a meeting ground in certain clinically observed situations—in a word, in the anomalies of voice and vocal functioning sometimes met with in what might be called psychogenic castrati, which may even approximate those characterizing the subjects of actual castration. One thinks of the alteration of the voice which a castration situation is capable of inducing in the individual as a transitory phenomenon; on the other hand, of the distinctive voice quality and enunciation characterizing a certain proportion of male overt (and unconscious) homosexuals; and of the extreme instance exemplified