This paper expresses the thesis that acts of dismemberment attempt to disintegrate the most important object representation in order to reconstitute it in a subjectively more meaningful way. The older man described in the paper cut his victim into seven pieces, each one representing a lost member of his own family. Then he merged with his own mother-child image. A younger man attempted to protect his wife from his image of her destruction by dismembering another woman. Dionysian, Toltec, Mayan and Aztec ritual dismemberments are seen as collective repetitive re-enactments of infantile ego states seeking access to the gifts of the gods through primary identification.