Between Barbarity and Exclusion, Circumcision: the Worst of Racism and the Greatest Crime Against Humanity

(Sexual mutilation, an unconscious ultra-racism masked behind religion, tradition, culture and folklore)

(PARIS) - Whereas most cultures respect the human body, a minority (20% of humanity), destroys the specific organs of autosexuality (the foreskin, and sometimes the clitoris). The frequent use of the same term to designate both mutilations shows that circumcision and excision have the same end. However, the horrible havocs of excision are only the tip of the iceberg of sexual mutilation. For if the sometimes serious physiological and sexological damage of circumcision is the most often overshadowed, its planetary psychic-sociological outcome is dramatic.

The ineptitude of circumcision is blatant in the fact that one of the main expected result: reducing sexual desire, is not reached. It must be presumed that other goals are aimed at. Massively practised upon unable to protest minors, these human sacrifices and torture are the height of brutal methods of education that teach submission to force, sexism, racism, violence and barbarity.

Miriam Pollack showed that circumcision is a matter of sexism. Circumcision is all the more sexist that it forces men to dominate women, laboriously, in coitus. Sexism being degree zero of racism, it is not astonishing that the latter should be present in mutilations that discriminate children and communities from the rest of humanity.

1/ Confusion of ideas is at the heart of racist thought and the racism of sexual mutilation lies on a series of mixtures:

1.1 The mixture between sexual mutilation and superiority. The fantasmatic feeling of a physical superiority has been exposed by Reyes and Zagdanski. But above all, circumcision belongs to a puritan moral order the unavowed design of which is to dominate the population, beginning with the youth, through the terror of a human sacrifice threatening of castration and death. Its implementation is made easier by the spreading of the belief in a moral superiority; supermen (superwomen) are produced, assumed to be morally superior, elected by God or the ancestors. Based on a physical differentiation, this discrimination is an artificial racism. Resting upon a guilt and will of punishment as nonsensical the one as the other, this claim of moral, and even spiritual superiority (the mutilation suggests abstention and despise of autosexuality, decreed a sin), is as hypocrite as megalomaniac.

1.2 The mixture between gender and sex. Sometimes present (African cultures), it imagines that the suppression of the sexual organs evoking the opposite sex would grant a superiority through an additional femininity or masculinity.

1.3 The mixture between distinctive physical sign and ignored handicap. May 7 2012, obtaining the approval of seventy per cent of the population, the high court of Köln condemned the circumcision of minors but tolerated elective mutilation in adulthood. Yet, elementary bioethics^, ^, makes no distinction of age to forbid to perform a mutilation without a "very serious medical motive". There is no right to mutilate someone; there is no right either to mutilate oneself. This amalgam is common to the mutilators and to those who condemn them but tolerate the realization of particular signs through mutilation.

1.4 The mixture between a particular physical sign and a sign of ethnical identity. It comes within a sectarian choice that insults the human species. Distinguishing the ethnic group through a surgical operation is a discriminatory, ultra-racist collective madness. Psychiatry would qualify it a transgenerational and collective syndrome of Münchhausen by proxy. The fanatic worshipers of Cybele (ancient Greece), those of the sect of Skoptzis (Russia), and the Hidjas (India) did or do (Hidjas) not stop at the castration of the foreskin; they would cut the whole penis off!

1.5 The antiJew-anticircumcision mixture. It holds sway in the Jewish community through ignoring the existence of the multi-millennial Jewish current against circumcision illustrated by Queen Jezebel and King Ahab, the Seleucids slaughtered by the Maccabeus, the supporters of baptism by water with John the Baptist and Jesus Christ, the German Reform rabbis of the 19th century around Abraham Geiger and their followers in the United States, politicians Olry Terquem and Bernard Lazare, psychoanalysts Freud, Groddeck, Reich, Bettelheim, Lewinter, Julia Kristeva, Alice Miller Tobie Nathan, philosophers Spinoza, Jacques Rosenberg and Jacques Derrida, the medicine Nobel prizes Francis Crick and George Wald, Professor Alexandre Minkowski, pediatrician Aldo Naouri, the powerful US Jewish movement against circumcision, filmmakers Woody Allen, Ivan Attal, Nurith Aviv and Daniel Burman, the advocate Linda Weil-Curiel, Judge Jean-Pierre Rosenczveig... Systematically used by the religious who claim that the abandonment of circumcision would provoke the end of the community, it is the worst of all, the most paranoid. It is accompanied by an emotional blackmail that creates an outcry: "If circumcision is forbidden to us, we shall quit the country!" But nowhere do we see that circumcision would be a prerequisite of the existence of a religion or a people.

Primitive thought happens to make sexual mutilation a condition of belonging to the social group:

"And the uncircumcised male, who will not have cut off the flesh of his outgrowth, will himself be cut off from his people for having broken my covenant." Genesis, 17: 14

"... if you keep my covenant, you will be my treasure between all peoples..." Exodus, 19: 5

Masked behind religion, tradition, culture and folklore, the artificial racism of circumcision is more cunning than ordinary racism. Its most impudent form is the hegemonic racism by divine right granted by God in exchange of circumcision:

"At the age of eight days, that every male from amongst you be circumcised…" Genesis, 17: 12

Queen Victoria and Hitler wanted to take advantage of the lesson. Eager to conquer a colonial empire, the first one imagined for herself Jewish ascendants and set circumcision by Jewish mohels up into the royal family. Without going this far, Nazism reversed the axiom in order to affirm:

So, even if, on occasions, other religions show themselves more barbarous, Judaism is in its very principle, the worst religion, the most racist, the only one that makes barbarity against the child a condition of national identity paradoxically decreed by a "God" who comes back upon his own creation in order to discriminate part of it.

The creation of a physical peculiarity isolates the ethnic group from other ethnic groups and several Jewish authors have emphasized the fact that circumcision generates racism:

- in 1909, Freud exposed the danger of a racism induced by circumcision with non-Jewish children:

"The castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism; for even in the nursery, little boys hear that the Jews have something cut off in their penis – a piece of their penis, they think – and this gives them a right to despise the Jews.",

- in 2001, in philosophical terms, Rozenberg spread the remark to adults including the Jews themselves:

"... the otherness of the Jew confronts itself with the fellow creature, and only has for equivalent that of woman.",

"The Jewish people bothers and scares because it represents the Other. This equivalence precisely points at the thematic link that gathers myth and psychopathology, themselves epiphenomena of a double crisis of sexual and cultural identity. This equivalence provokes in both cases a phantasmagoria bearing, on the one hand upon the anatomical difference, perceptible as well with woman as with the circumcised Jew, and, on the other hand, upon an attachment to the natural and carnal materiality that they similarly embody."

In 2002 and in terms accessible to the general public, Reyes and Zagdanski have exposed that inescapable consequence of circumcision with young Jewish boys:

"In my kid's head, an uncircumcised penis looked like the sex organ of a dog, the uneven aspect, the bright red little top…That really did not seem very aesthetic to me compared to my own or my brothers' penises... A feeling of great difference, thus... between me and the nonJews, the majority. In other words, between me and all the others. With, all the same, a slight complex of superiority because of that disclosure, namely that the non-Jews' penises looked like the sex organs of dogs."

This admirable avowal shows how circumcision, through the unconsciousness of a handicap reversed into an advantage, generates deep intimate, emotional belief in an ethnic superiority of quasi-biological order, without even needing to resort to the religious vindications of that so-called superiority.

"But a private person may not perform such an ablation (mutilation of a member), even with the patient's consent; it would be committing an injustice to society, to which man belongs with all his limbs." Saint Thomas Aquinas¹⁸

"… the Jews having lived apart from all nations in such a way that they incurred universal hatred, and this not only by observing exterior rites contrary to those of other nations, but by the sign of circumcision…" Baruch Spinoza.

"For it is a barbarous thing to meet a newly born infant with the knife, with a deliberate mutilation." George Wald, medicine Nobel prize

"…not only does not the child's body belong to us but... its sex still less." Françoise Dolto

"Ritual practices of circumcision and excision have effects that reach not only the individual and their descendants but also other men." Alice Miller²¹

"... circumcision is an appalling aggression practised without anaesthesia and that can only leave an as unconscious as abominable memory to the being who suffered it and makes him a slave for life." Frédérick Leboyer ²²

"How could a being who has been aggressed in this way, while totally helpless, develop into a relaxed, loving, trusting person? Indeed he will never be able to trust anyone in life, he will always be on the defensive, unable to open up to others and to life." Frédérick Leboyer

"Another psychological consequence of early circumcision is that it imprints an aggressive and traumatic situation onto the mind of the newborn… The impossibility of processing such a tremendous infusion of inwardly focused aggression may lead, a posteriori, to the emergence of psychopathic and violent behaviour or, in many other cases, to the emergence of extreme masochistic behaviour." Moisés Tractenberg²⁴

"The greatest crime against humanity is the torture and mutilation of children."²⁵

"... society ... till now said yes to humanity’s greatest crimes." Alice Miller

"In Western society, circumcision is imposed on the defenceless child to whom it offers no definite advantage and for whom it is, consequently, undesirable and threatening…"

"… (the handicap) confronts each one of those who are not affected by this disablement to the anguish of castration, to the horror of the narcissistic wound, and, beyond, to the irreparable of physical or psychic death, thus establishing the most uncompromising of exclusions."

Freud and Roheim stated the deepest observations concerning the sexual rituals of separation from the mother with a value of threat of castration-exclusion:

"The results of the threat of castration are multifarious and incalculable; they affect the whole of a boy’s relations with his father and mother and subsequently with men and women in general."

"(1) … The primaeval custom of circumcision, another substitute for castration, can only be understood as an expression of submission to the father's will… "

This radical condemnation of circumcision remains discrete; it does not underline that, consisting in a beginning of realization, circumcision is the worst threat of castration.

"... the superabundance (with Australian aborigenes) of ritual dealing with this theme (orality) is a camouflage of the Oedipus complex." Geza Roheim

At last, it falls to Tobie Nathan to have drawn the political consequences of the phenomenon by comparing circumcision to Nazi initiation; initiation through sadism is initiation to sadism:

"Himmler ignored his nourishing sadistic drives, the initiation he received in the corpse of the SS revealed it to him... "³¹^{, p. 20}

"The combination of these three levels (isolated emotion, and its ability to trigger perplexity, the attack against strongly invested parts of the body and its ability to trigger "anguish of castration", the paradoxical terms and their ability to trigger confusion) is essential to the expulsion of a subject from her or his envelope of meaning."^{p. 21}

How better say that sexual mutilation risks seriously destabilizing the individual, and humanity as a whole, as every day proven by the various group or state terrorisms of religious-feodal societies of the Middle-East and Africa?

These observations explain why, with sensitive persons notably (feminists, far right), sexual mutilation provokes, more or less consciously, an aversion that may go up to the fiercest hatred.

"The child shall be protected from practices that… may foster racial, religious or any other form of discrimination..." Principle 10 of the International convention on the rights of the child of the UNO

"Subjecting a person whose vulnerability or state of dependence are apparent or known to the author, to working or living conditions incompatible with human dignity is punished by five years in prison and a 150,000 Euros fine." article 225-14 of the French criminal code

But since sexual mutilation is committed "for the sake of the child", within love, and therefore without intention of harming, criminal law is inapplicable and the only means of repressing it is denouncing its endogamous and racist aim.

6/ The belief in a superiority resulting from sexual mutilation is the basic element of a racist thought that excludes the so-called "non-circumcised"

Exclusion, the sanction of the group to opponents of sexual mutilation, is the symptom of a feeling of superiority that enables the sexually handicapped to artificially overcome the trauma of the operation and, notably for the majority of women, the depression and sadness provoked by a sexuality that is the most often wrecked. As a corollary, mutilation is a condition for marriage and a barrier to marrying outside the group, a great concern of a racism that goes up to excluding foreigners from cemeteries, and even forbidding them burial on the national territory (Islam). The superiority allegedly conferred by sexual mutilation is affirmed in the Bible (dogma of the election). According to some pseudo- philosophical rationalizations, circumcision would inscribe man into the dimension of lack (sic). Maimonides and Philo of Alexandria, uphold that circumcision grants the individual with virtue, loftiness of the mind, purity, chastity, and even a fidelity that nevertheless condones (Muslims) or condoned (Jews till the XIVth century) polygamy:

"This commandment has not been prescribed to correct a physical deficiency but a moral deficiency." Maimonides³²

In one word, the "noncircumcised" are profligate! Reference to the "moral order" is explicit. This fantastical belief seems to be at the origin of Freud's affirmation of a superior ability of the Jews for spirituality³³. Males of the planet would be shared between great mystics, sexually mutilated, and other men, meanly earth-bound for having kept their foreskin. The trite insult: "Uncircumcised dog" testifies that in the circumcising imaginary, circumcision differentiates man from animals. Birds do not have a foreskin but circumcision does not seem to give the wings of the angel.

That superstition finds its origin in the likening of sexuality, and very particularly autosexuality, with sin. Those queasy conceptions rest upon ignorance (or guilt) of the delights provided by the specific organs for autosexuality. Élisabeth Roudinesco praises the latter:

"...if, in the course of the second half of the XX^th century, mas........n has ceased to be classified as a mental disease, thanks, to a great extent, to Freudian theory, it is henceforth claimed, by numerous post-Freudian liberation movements, as the purest expression of a sexuality that, at last rid of the rags of puritan moral, allows unlimited pleasure, without risk of contamination, without procreation, without a bothering partner.

A symbol of modern individualism, lonely sex may at last be seen – particularly on the internet – as a discovery of oneself or as an exile that sinks into melancholy. In the case in point, the "surrogated danger", reduced by Freud to the polymorph triteness of infancy, has become the emblem of a sexuality^(*) raised into an ethics of liberty."

The deep unconscious or displayed guilt weighing upon autosexuality leads to reciprocal despise between circumcised and intacts. The psychiatrist Michel Erlich points out that "goy", "uncircumcised" and "uncircumcised dog", are grave insults³⁵. That claim of superiority sometimes degenerates into snobbery, which was the case in the United Kingdom, where circumcision first spread within the nobility, and in the United States where it is a criterion of social standing. It finds its sanctioning in language: the intact is never named as such but as a "non" or as an "un" -circumcised, with the connotation of loss and emptiness linked up to negation. Jacques Derrida himself, in a depressive episode it is true, came to wonder whether his decision not to have his sons circumcised would not make them suffer from "a lack of lack"! This inversion (denial) of realities is characteristic of perversion. Isn’t it perverse indeed to pretend oneself "elected by God" in order to reassure oneself about one's own difference through lessening the others (by humiliating instead of simply exact naming? A basic principle of right applies to that pseudo-spirituality:

That conviction of superiority does not stop there. From all antiquity, the circumcised believe themselves cleaner:

"Also, neither man nor woman in Egypt would kiss a Greek on the mouth nor use a Greek’s … knife." Herodote

The intact are assumed lustful, impure and even unclean! The popular prejudice of the sexually maimed that the intact are "masturbators without hygiene" is not likely to put racism at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, the circumcised plunge their organ without fear into the feminine one which, following them, would be a culture fluid. They also spread the rumour according to which they would perform sexual exploits. Whatever it may be, a superiority resting upon a physical difference is of racist type. The foreskin does not smell like cheese, circumcision stinks of racism.

We are not only in the presence of racism. We are also facing an odious sexist manipulation. Indeed, young women easily believe the superstitions according to which the "non-circumcised" are without hygiene, bad lovers, profligate and, in cultures that practise the mutilation after the age of speech, coward ("A non-circumcised is not a man.", African saying). So that a foreigner can hardly marry a Muslim or a Jewish woman. As acknowledged or even denounced by Maimonides's historical hoax, it is obvious that these rumours have been invented in order to make sure of the possession of women through endogamy, in the illusion to reinforce the cohesion and perpetuation of the community.

This racism is strikingly affirmed with feminine excision for which, in Western countries, parents would affirm: "If we don't do it, she will not find a husband." Inside their ethnic group maybe! And the same can be said of circumcision: "If we do not circumcise him, he won't find a wife.", meaning "within the community". A surgically strengthened racism is the height of racism.

To top it all, circumcision is intended to separate the child from the mother, from the world of women and childhood. There precisely lies the most criminal intention, the most abject, the most sexist, the most contrary to life, love and the best of existence. All this in the deep aim of steering the males' affects towards the world of men, ploughmen and makers, excluding women of it in order to dominate them better. We are going to see that circumcision is the most dreadfully efficient weapon of patriarchy against women (and men).

That discriminatory attitude, conscious and resolute with extremist elites, remains unconscious and denied by the masses. Sexual mutilation is less religious than sectarian. Like castration of barbarous cults, it aims at shutting the group upon itself in order to ensure the power of the chiefs. Indeed, that sexist and racist arrogance is cultivated by religious-political elites who cherish circumcision like the apple of their eyes because it is at the basis of their power. They deliberately use it as a technique of manipulation of the masses:

"It is well-known how much men like and help each other when they all have the same distinctive mark which is for them a kind of alliance and agreement." Maimonides

Separating the group from others by a sectarian act, a ultra-racism founded upon a small but significant difference that flatters and exacerbates the narcissism of the group, finds a privileged means of expression in sexual mutilation:

"It is my opinion that circumcision has another important motive: it makes that those who profess this idea of the unity of God distinguish themselves by a same body sign which is imprinted on them all, so that the one who is not part of them cannot, being a stranger, pretend belonging to them." Maimonides

So, circumcision is a sexist artificial racism masked behind religion, tradition, culture and folklore. That chauvinism is easily rooted into the mind as well by its link with the weighty taboo of autosexuality as by woman’s (man’s) denial of her (his) own femininity (masculinity). It is strengthened by an unconscious awe of castration or death, generated with the victims as well as their neighbours.

Exclusion calls for hatred. Spinoza and Freud exposed circumcision as a source of hatred from neighbouring peoples whom they scare. An extremely serious collective pathology (transgenerational and collective syndrome of Münchhausen by proxy), it generates particularly high violence. Of the twenty two genocides of modern times: Circassian Muslims (1860), Congolese (1870), Hereros (1904-07), Greeks (1914-18), Assyrians (1914-20), Armenians (1915), Serbs (41-45), Jews (1942-45), Tziganes (1942-45), Tchechens (1944-48), Biafrans (1966-68), Guineans (1968-79), Bengalis (1971), Hutus (1972), East Timor inhabitants (1975-99), Kurds (1988-89), Tutsis (1993), Bengalis (1990-2000), Bosnians (1991-95), inhabitants of Darfur (2003), Iraqi Kurds (2005), Rohinghyas (2012), nineteen (86%) involved circumcised peoples on at least one side and five on both sides. The circumcised perpetrated twelve of them, of which eight against intacts. We are forced to report the narrowness of the correlation between circumcision and genocide. But for one civil war (Sri Lanka), all wars between 1996 and 2002 involved at least one circumcising country and they were more than three times more numerous in circumcising countries. The death penalty is twice more frequent in them and they are the only ones to practise excision. In Norway, between 2006 and 2010, 2% of the population who are circumcised committed all the rapes upon ninety per cent of native Norwegians. Circumcised Congo holds the world record for rape: 400,000 over a period of one year. Sexual mutilation separates the child from the mother at the age of bonding. This is monstrous, the result is catastrophic. Circumcision is the breeding ground of paranoia, sexism, fanaticism and group or state terrorism. It makes the equilibrium of terror and the fortune of gun merchants.

Psychiatry will speak of collective madness without explaining anything but psychoanalysis enlightens us. Indeed, Freud stated a theory of the racism generated by circumcision that it is enough to push up at its end in order to understand the madness of genocide:

"The hypothesis that a root of those hatreds of the Jews which occur in such primary ways and lead to such irrational behaviour among the nations of the West, must be sought here too, seems inescapable to me. Circumcision is unconsciously equated with castration."

Since the unconscious, according to him, likens the part to the whole, then, a threat of castration is also a threat of death. But exerted on a whole ethnic group, an individual threat of death becomes, through addition, a threat of extermination of the whole group, immediately projected upon the adverse group by the unconscious. So, circumcision is a push towards reciprocal genocide.

So, the abolition of consciousness (Hannah Arendt's triviality of evil) picked out by Mazarine Pingeot is a submission to the unconscious that, run by rules just as rigorous as that of ethics, ignores good and evil. The banality of circumcision is thus directly responsible for the multiplication of genocides of which two, reciprocal and atomic, are presently threatening, still in contact with circumcision: in Palestine and in Korea.

More fascist than fascism, sexual mutilation is unbearable to Western fascists. But democrats may not tolerate it. Taking the festivities of folklore for alibi, these ordeals are imposed by military and religious elites with adolescent behaviour. It has a sexist character. It considers women and children as objects and does not welcome the child into a society regulated by the difference of sexes and ages. It socializes or affiliates through the trauma of a barbarous military initiation that enlists for war. So, it is encouraged by tyrannical regimes which use it as an induction to violence and a sign of rallying. The community sign is always a call for nationalism, a sign of war, of possession of the individual and exclusion of foreigners. Scarf, veil, burka, kippa, tattoos, forced obesity, stretched oral or vulvar labia, scarification, knocked off teeth, bound-feet, cut off clitorises and foreskins, the death penalty, to arms et cetera..., the escalation of the techniques of manipulation of the minds through marking the bodies, the worst instrument of the war of generations, channels human needs at the service of the interests of the ruling classes and generations.

Racism is all the more arrogant as it leans on mutilations that aim at ensuring the possession of women. Sexual mutilation is not properly racist but aiming at making "supermen", it is an artificial racism more racist than racism, power two racism, some neo-Gobineau implemented by Mengele. Founding a collective identity upon an assault against that of the species is not only degrading in itself, it is also discriminatory. The peoples who carve out an identity through knife for themselves upon the body of their children offend the rest of humanity. Sexual mutilation, circumcision very particularly, is a genuine cancer that gnaws at the planet. Collectively exerted in the name of God and/or tradition, that hyper-racism is a monstrous abomination, generating terrorism, sometimes state terrorism, and an as virulent counter-racism. The abolition of this crime against humanity all the graver since it is perpetrated upon children is a stage in the fight against the repression of sexuality and for the right of the human person to the free access to their own body and the respect of their physical, emotional and mental integrity.

In sexual matter, moral superiority consists in not making love without love, which presupposes a good knowledge of the other. That implies, as long as a loving and loved companion has not been found, to make love alone with the instruments given by nature, without false morality.

Independent psychoanalysis researcher, a former pupil of the Psychoanalysis department of Paris VIII University, author of "Feminine and masculine sexual mutilation, the greatest crime against humanity", for free at academia.edu

¹ Veil S. Preface to the supplement to the Bulletin de l'Académie nationale de médecine 2004, 188 (6).

⁵ Bertaux-Navoiseau M. Sexual mutilation and the moral order (problematic and basic concepts of the fight against sexual mutilation).

⁶ Bertaux-Navoiseau M. H. Between barbarity and exclusion, circumcision, a nec plus ultra of racism: sexual mutilation, an unconscious, hyper-dangerous ultra-racism, masked behind culture, tradition, religion and folklore. http://independent.academia.edu/MichelHerv%C3%A9BertauxNavoiseau/Papers.

¹² Bertaux-Navoiseau M. H. Circumcision, a dangerous collective madness: from an individual psychosis to collective psychosis psychiatry, psychoanalysis and circumcision.

¹⁵ Freud S. Analysis of a phobia on a five-years-old boy (Little Hans). 1909. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1955. S.E., X, p. 36, n.

¹⁶ Rozenberg J. Biologie de la race et psychopathologie. Archives de philosophie 64, 2001.

²⁰ Dolto F. Les jeux sexuels de vos enfants. Interview par Pierre Bénichou. Planning familial, octobre 1969 (3), 9.

²¹ Miller A. Banished knowledge - Facing childhood injuries. New York: Anchor press; 1997. Chap VII.

²⁴ Tractenberg M. Psychoanalysis of circumcision. Male and female circumcision. New York: Denniston et al. Plenum publishers; 1999.

²⁶ Miller A. Introduction to reflections about sexual mutilation, in Banished knowledge - Facing childhood injuries. New York: Doubleday; 1990., p. 131.

²⁸ Kristeva J. Aux frontières du vivant. Le magazine littéraire, février 2004 (428). 33-36.

²⁹ Freud S. An outline of psychoanalysis. 1938. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1964. S.E., XXII, p. 190, note 1.

³⁰ Psychoanalysis and anthropology. New York: International university press; 1950. p. 149-150.

³¹ L'art de renaître, fonction thérapeutique de l'affiliation au moyen du traumatisme sexuel. Nouvelle revue d'ethnopsychiatrie, 1992, (18) : 20-21.

³² Maimonides M. The guide of the perplexed. 1160. Chicago: Chicago University press; 1963. p. 609.

^(*)The Italian original does not say “sexuality” but “sexual perversion”. But, taking into account Freud's preceding quotation, autosexuality and perversion are rigorously antinomic and we have corrected there a very Freudian mistake, a testimony, in this otherwise admirable text, of the extreme strength of the taboo weighing upon autosexuality. On the one hand, one may not call the sexuality of children, adolescents, bachelors, widows(ers) and temporarily separated or divorced or with different sexual need couples perversion, on the other hand, it is impossible to establish that the denial of the reality of the other sex that is the essence of perversion, would accompany autosexuality. It would be paradoxical concerning the use of organs that precisely evoke the other sex. Autosexuality is certainly not a perversion. Another sign of our Lacanian's ambivalence is her persistence in the use of the pejorative, traditional term in order to designate autosexuality.

³⁴ Roudinesco É. The mutilated sex. Brief story of a chirurgical passion. Preface to "Sulla soglia della psychoanalisi, Freud i la follia infantile". Bonomi C. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri; 2007. (translated by us)

³⁵ Erlich M. Circoncision, excision et racisme. Nouvelle revue d'ethnopsychiatrie 1991, 18, 127.

³⁸ Maimonides M. The guide of the perplexed. 1160. Chicago: Chicago University press; 1963. p. 609.

³⁹ Freud S. Moses and monotheism. 1936. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1964. S.E., XXIII, p. 91.