A Circumcision Fantasy

Analysts have always been keenly interested in the psychoanalytic and anthropological implications of circumcision: however, as Nunberg (4) observed, detailed accounts from patients of fantasies about circumcision are notably rare in the psychoanalytic literature. A singular circumcision fantasy that appeared in identical form in two patients prompts this report.

Both patients were intelligent, well-educated Jews whose moderately orthodox religious training provided familiarity with Jewish religious practices and lore. One patient, treated by intensive analytically oriented psychotherapy, was a latent schizophrenic whose difficulties included an exhibitionistic perversion of many years duration. The other, in psychoanalysis, was a neurotic whose only perverse trait was an occasional compulsive drive suddenly to exhibit his penis to his wife. Both patients had been in treatment approximately four years. In both instances the conscious fantasy was that circumcision consists simply of incising the dorsal aspect of the prepuce, thus permitting it to roll back behind the glans penis.

Questioning revealed that as children they both had attended circumcision rites. The exhibitionist recovered memories of observing the actual proceedings, while the neurotic reported memories which only strongly suggested that he had also directly witnessed the surgery. It was definitely established that both men had repressed their knowledge of the reality and had defensively elaborated the conscious fantasy. These well-educated patients had managed to avoid connecting the term circumcision with their conscious knowledge that the prefix circum signifies around, about, or on all sides.

The lifting of his defenses brought to light the extraordinary value of the prepuce to the exhibitionist. Thinly disguised fantasies included the possession of a prepuce which could magically protect his glans from injury and castration, and his penis from destruction by phallic penetration. The neurot