[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]
Male genital anxiety is ubiquitous. Most men typically pass through stages in their childhood where they are overly and consciously anxious about their genitals. Preoccupations with size and performance are common enough experiences as to offer an endless supply of late night comedic material. The developmental history of genital anxiety, often referred to by its short hand, castration anxiety, is instructive. At approximately age 4, the young boy enters the Oedipal phase of his development. The psychological and developmental conflicts of the period have to do with (partially) surrendering his attachment to his first love, his mother, in preparation for entering the real world. As the boy undergoes the physical changes that are part of his entry into the Oedipal Phase, his penis becomes the center of his emotional life. Nascent and inchoate sexual sensations become centered on his penis and it is not uncommon for 4 and 5 year old boys to show off their physical prowess and their penis, both aspects of their body that bring great joy and excitement. At the same time the knowledge that their mother, for all the love and affection she showers upon him, prefers to sleep with his father, introduces elements of jealousy and rivalry. In Freud's famous construction, the boy finally gives up his mother to his father for fear of his father's wrath, embodied for the child in terror of being castrated for challenging his father.
Many have criticized various aspects of the Freudian understanding of the Oedipal conflict and its crucial role in castration anxiety, but few critics have questioned the role of genital anxiety in the resolution of the Oedipal phase and its centrality to male psychosexual development. Events that intensify the already extant castration anxiety of the period are likely to have long lasting repercussions in the development of the boy. For that reason, understanding the role and nature of circumcision in the Arab culture and for the Arab mind is of great importance. An aspect of the Arab culture that is clearly related to genital anxiety pertains to the Arab fear of female sexuality. In Part III of The Arab Mind, I described how the important women in the very young Arab boy's life would stimulate his penis to sooth him or merely to amuse themselves. This has the effect of establishing from an early age that an Arab boy, to a much greater extent than in the West, has no control over his own sexual excitement. His excitement arises from external sources out of his control. Western men may joke about their excitement and lust being forced upon them by a beautiful woman but for Arab men it is much closer to a realistic depiction of their experience.
While it may seem counter-intiuitive, the practice of circumcision in the Arab world exascerbates this trend.
Various sources, including first person accounts and personal communications, describe circumcision in Arab nations as typically public occasions and typically occurring either at the height of the Oedipal phase or any time thereafter up until puberty. Commentators point out that while it has been religiously sanctioned to circumcise at 7 days or at any age before puberty, most accounts place the rite during the Oedipal or latency phase. Circumcision performed during infancy has certain significant advantages for psychosexual development, features that distinguish it in important ways from circumcision performed at later ages.
First of all, circumcision is an extremely painful experience. At 7 or 8 days of age (8 days being the time for circumcision in the Jewish religion) physical sensations in the infant have not yet become localized. Pain produces bodily reactions, certainly, but it is diffuse and pre-symbolic. In other words, the experience of a painful procedure is non-specific. Only later, when the child learns about the rite of circumcision does it take on symbolic meaning. Vulnerable boys may incorporate their childish knowledge of circumcision within their fantasy life, enhancing fears of genital damage and loss, but it is a symbolic fear. For boys who undergo circumcision at a later age, they have already developed the capacity to understand the act as a concrete genital assault that concretizes whatever pre-existing anxiety they already contain. The pain and the shock of the pain imprint genital vulnerability upon the young mind in ways that a symbolic representation cannot. The memory is not merely a construct of partial fantasied images and language but is an explicit struture within memory (though in time, the affective component of the experience can be and usually is repressed and placed firmly in the unconscious.) It is equivalent to the difference between the common place fantasies of sexual seduction that many children develop when trying to comprehend adult sexuality and the traumatic effect of actual sexual relations between a child and an adult.
One other point to remember in terms of the painful nature of circumcision. Men who have been circumcised will unhappily report that sexual excitement, ie obtaining an erection, which stretches the skin of the penis, is extremely painful and the pain persists until full healing has occurred. Young boys have even less control over their erections than adult men and, as has been pointed out, they experience their excitement as arriving from external sources and being more than usual out of their control. The result is that sexual excitement is indelibly fused with anxiety and pain.
It is important to understand that these dynamics do not apply to every Arab man, but the cultural practice of post-infancy circumcision reinforces some of the most troubling aspects of the Arab Mind. It reinforces pre-existing feelings of genital vulnerability that have been established both by the maternal manipulations described in Part III and the fear of the father as described in Part VI. Along with the frequent physical abuse/punishment described, Oedipal age circumcision concretizes the heretofore fantasied punishment for transgressions that have made the transition from early childhood to latency already problematic. It introduces the idea that punishments are disproportionate (threatened and actual partial castration in response to regressive childhood wishes) and reinforces the tendency toward harsh treatment of those who are in dependant positions in the society (through identification with the aggressor.)
In addition, the Superego and conscience which form in part by an identification with the feared father is more likely to be harsh and strict.
The outcome of these constellations of feelings, fantasies, and experiences is too often a young man with significant sexual insecurities, a rigid superego, fear of and anger toward women, an intolerance of weakness, and heightened sadistic tendencies in their psychosexual life. It is sadly not terribly difficult to extrapolate from this to the tendency in some Arab communities to see uncovered women as "whores" and "temptresses" who are fair game for rape and abuse.
Again, this is not invariant and determinative but across a population such child rearing habits as I have described create more than the desired proportion of rigid, anxious, and angry men who are poorly adapted for a changing, demanding world.
Unfortunately many of these tendencies are further reinforced by the Arab approach to education and learning, a topic to be explored in a future post.
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