A Note on Homosexuality and Circumcision

A homosexual patient was circumcised at the age of eight in a traumatic manner. For years following he was consciously affected by this happening: whenever he met a man or a boy, he wondered whether he too had been circumcised. He has a marked castration complex: he is afraid of knives, of the dentist, cannot bear to see violence in the threatre, etc.

Speaking about his circumcision he wondered what happened to the foreskin that had been cut off, adding unhappily, ‘They just threw it away’. In a similar way he was preoccupied about the fate of a man with whom he had had a sexual affair, and who had a tragic death. The lover was a substitute for the narcissistically overeval-uated foreskin, and an attempt to be reunited with it. His resentment against his mother at whose instigation he had been circumcised was reflected in his bitterness against a mother substitute who made him abandon his homosexual lover. In both instances he voiced the same complaint: if the affair had to be broken off, if he had to be circumcised, at least it should have been done in a different manner, with more consideration.

The resentment and fear of his mother associated with circumcision was an important factor in the development of his homosexuality. More remotely it was linked with training in cleanliness. As she later parted him from his foreskin, so originally she deprived him he felt of his excreting; as she later disapproved of sex and enjoyment in a very puritanical way, so she first interfered with his anal pleasures. Her training in cleanliness he transformed into extremely high moral standards, which caused him suffering, and an inability to be in the wrong. If he was in the wrong, he felt dirty, vulnerable, and afraid of his mother. In adult life he had his revenge: he supported his mother and did his formal duty as a son; but he withheld the one thing she wanted, his affection.

To him women were dirty. This was the perpetuation of his mother's sexual taboos. At the same time, he wa