The Knees as Fantasied Genitals*

We are more aware of some parts of our body image than others, at least until injury or disease affects the latter. Thus the main zones of satisfaction and frustration name the developmental stages of instinct theory. Other areas, and perhaps particularly the organs of motility, remain largely unmapped psychoanalytically. Among these are the knees, which Bunker and Lewin6 claim to be unconsciously associated with reproduction and in particular with the fantasied male womb. The very strangeness of this notion accords with the fact that Bunker and Lewin arrived at it from the consideration of relatively abstruse cultural material, i.e., the Indogermanic linguistic root of GN, KN, CN. Their paper followed one then unpublished by Bunker7 in which he had discussed a variant of the Greek myth of the birth of Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus and a parallel Modoc Indian myth of the creator Kumush giving birth from his knee. In both instances the gods had unwittingly killed the baby's mother, then thrust it into their thighs or knees to save its life. Bunker and Lewin concluded that “the mythological evidence is unequivocal of an (unconscious) equating of the knee with the womb (or at any rate with the ‘male womb’ of the “second birth’ which at puberty every male child must undergo) … [and] that, besides, this same unconscious concept is implicitly present in the ‘structure’ of the Indogermanic group of languages, such