SOURCE: Paul, Robert A. “Bettelheim's Contribution to Anthropology.” In Educating the Emotions: Bruno Bettelheim and Psychoanalytic Development, edited by Nathan M. Szajnberg, pp. 151-72. New York: Plenum Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Paul discusses Bettelheim's theory of womb envy and relates it to Freud's theory of penis envy.]

Bettelheim's unmasking of male's womb envy is as fundamentally profound to our society as Freud's presentation of female penis envy. Yet Bettelheim's discovery has met with resounding silence in our psychoanalytic community, and a few tut-tuts or titters in the anthropological community. Paul sets the intellectual record straight by demonstrating that the ethnographic data following Bettelheim's book confirms it—a rare opportunity in the social sciences.

Paul reviews the fundamentals of Bettelheim's argument: previous psychoanalytic theory held that ritual penile mutilation was a residuum of castration. In contrast, preliterate societies treat this rite as a mastery of an existential dilemma—boys do not have a definitive marker of puberty onset, unlike girls' menarche; as such, male mutilation “induces” menstruation and assimilates female reproductive powers.

When presenting the recent ethnographic data, Paul remarks that these “people act as if they read Bettelheim's book before they set about making up their culture.”

Then Paul takes a challenging synthetic step after citing critiques of Bettelheim's work and Bettelheim's critiques of Freud. He suggests that these apparently disparate theories are complementary: like any creative act (ritual, symptom, fine art), it is multiply determined. A powerful, painful act like male adolescent genital mutilation is kept alive by serving the psychological needs of the initiates, the initiators (adult males), and the women being imitated. The act contains the male wish to be powerful like the woman, the wish-fear to be castrated (to win the father's love), and the wish to face neither of these eventualities.

As Bettelheim said in his book, he believed that it was an antithetical response to Freud's thesis. As a new synthesis, he hoped it would provide a stimulus for new thinking, a new antithesis. This is how good scientific thinking proceeds—and how we become a better society.

Paul's chapter establishes womb envy as a phenomenon that exists in faraway preliterate societies—Melanesia, New Guinea, and Australia. What does this mean for contemporary America? As James Boon suggested in his critical study of anthropology, Westerners can learn much about others by traveling to exotic foreign locales; or they may learn little, by labeling these rituals and people as savage. In psychoanalysis, one may travel temporally far back to childhood in order to understand better one's contemporary thoughts, feelings, and beliefs; or one may use such reminiscences only to excuse, to mask one's contemporary motives and actions. What implications do such foreign mutilations have for us?

If womb envy is pervasive in contemporary American society, as I believe it is, we do not have comparable socially homogeneous and accepted rituals to mark the onset of boys' adolescent voyages and to bind their anxieties about such envy. Further, even in preliterate societies, we could justifiably (not self-righteously) ask: male mutilation may have an adaptive function to bind anxiety about womb envy, but at what cost, in terms of cultural defensive styles and possibly the overt subjugation of women? As a compromise formation, does the ritual partially bind anxiety, leaving some anxiety to find outlet in intrapsychic constriction and/or interpersonal restriction, such as demeaning women in order to bind one's envy?

And the more difficult question: to what extent and how do women contribute to the constellation of womb envy, other than the anatomical difference that engenders our psychological need to envy the other's prowess (whether penis, womb, intellect, or muscle)? The destructive power of coveting was recognized in the Ten Commandments.

These issues have far-reaching implications for our society that cannot be elaborated here. Freud believed that for each gender a fundamental issue was difficult, perhaps impossible to come to terms with: for men, their homoerotic yearnings, genetically derived from father; for women, their penis envy. The subsequent generation of analysts, such as Blos, demonstrated that both issues can be addressed successfully in late adolescence. They took up Freud's concern as a challenge. We ask the reader to speculate with us what it would mean for our society if male womb envy could be worked through and how this could be done in a psychoanalytically informed manner. This would truly be an act of culture, one as formidable as the draining of the Zuider Zee.

INTRODUCTION

GENITAL MUTILATION IN BOYS

Bruno Bettelheim's Symbolic Wounds (1954/1968) is an attempt to understand the ethnographic phenomenon of male initiation rituals involving genital mutilation found in many widely dispersed societies throughout the world, using insights gained through the observation of the spontaneous actions of children living in the Orthogenic School in Chicago. In assessing the importance of Bettelheim's theoretical contribution to the anthropological understanding of initiation rituals, my chapter will run the following course: after presenting the main arguments of Symbolic Wounds in summary fashion, I will demonstrate the extent to which Bettelheim's view that in performing genital mutilations on initiated boys, men are expressing envy of the female powers symbolized by menstruation is empirically borne out by the ethnographic data. I will then juxtapose Bettelheim's idea with an apparently contradictory theory according to which male initiation rites are intended not to imitate women, but to purge men of whatever female components they may possess as a result of their early socialization by women so as to induct them into adult male society. By closely examining the psychodynamics involved in the ritual symbolism of male initiation rites, I will then show that these two views may indeed be reconciled, so that Bettelheim's theory may be seen after all as a necessary component of our ways of thinking about initiation.

ANTHROPOLOGY'S RESISTANCE

Before getting to the body of my essay, however, I must take note of the fact that Bettelheim's ideas have encountered considerable resistance from anthropologists concerned with initiation rites, not so much because of their specific psychodynamic formulations, but rather because psychodynamic explanations as such are unacceptable to many anthropologists. There were, I believe, sound and legitimate reasons why the founding figures of modern anthropology, Boas and Durkheim, wanted to differentiate the study of culture and society from the study of individual psychology, and so insisted that explanations of social and cultural phenomena that appealed to psychological principles were not valid.

RITUALS AND SYMBOLS AS COLLECTIVE PHENOMENA

There is no doubt that rituals and ritual symbolism are more than simply the expression of individual motivations, and that they need to be seen as collective phenomena subject to explanations or interpretations that address the collective level. Too literal an adherence to these precautions, however, has led many anthropologists to ignore what is to me the self-evident fact that while the totality of a ritual extends way beyond the realm of personal motivation, yet ritual cannot exist without the deep and meaningful engagement of the intentions, wishes, and anxieties of those who participate in it; and that such engagement is achieved most effectively when the themes reflected in the symbolism and actions of ritual reflect and address themselves to the strongly felt psychodynamic motives and conflicts animating those involved. Public symbolism is not identical with private fantasy; but on the other hand, it is powerless unless it draws upon the latter and redirects it toward its own social and cultural agenda, as Victor Turner (1967) argued so persuasively in The Forest of Symbols.

I therefore disagree strongly with those theorists of initiation rites who reject Bettelheim's argument simply because it is psychodynamic, failing to see that explanations at the level of social reality and individual psychology not only do not contradict each other, but are necessary to each other. It would be a misrepresentation to assert that anthropology has uniformly rushed to embrace Bettelheim's ideas.

Thus, for example, Karen and Jeffrey Paige (1981), in their very ambitious book on reproductive ritual, offer a political argument for the practice of circumcision. Correlating the practice with the presence in a society of strong fraternal solidarity and the dilemma of fission in lineages, they take pride in the fact that their explanation renders moot all the various psychodynamic theories put forward to explain the practice:

The dilemma of fission … unlike the dilemma of Oedipus, is rooted in the social structure of adult society. If the dilemma of fission is the source of circumcision … it will not require a theoretical detour through infant personality, Oedipal rebellions against the primal father, or neurotic primitives.

(1981, p. 125)

In a less smug but no less adamant vein, Fried and Fried (1980), in their similarly ambitious study of rituals of life cycle transition, characterize their interpretive strategy thus:

While not entirely rejecting psychological explanations of ritual behavior, we prefer to deal with such behavior in economic and social contexts. Rather than seek universal human meanings in such institutions, we prefer more limited statements that provide for change as the economies and social arrangements of peoples undergo alteration.

(1980, pp. 169-170)

More forthright in setting forth its biases and presuppositions without even any need for supporting argument is this quotation from a recent book-length treatment of ritual by La Fontaine (1986). Specifically addressing Bettelheim's thesis, she writes:

Anthropologists do not accept the assumption that the institutions of any society can be identified with the fantasies of disordered adolescents. Behavior in non-Western societies cannot be explained by comparing them with children, let alone with psychotic children. Nor can the obligatory formalized action of a ritual, which is not created anew each generation but is part of a long tradition, be convincingly explained as springing from individual fantasies.

(1986, p. 112)

To take one final example illustrating a rather extreme instance of this mentality, let me cite Mary Douglas's (1966) rejection of Bettelheim's theory of genital operations, which she opposes not on its merits, but simply because it is a matter of foundational belief in the discourse of British social anthropology that public facts do not admit of private explanations, and that any ritual fact must therefore be understood as a reflection of social structure. She writes that when Bettelheim

argues that rituals which are explicitly designed to produce genital bleeding in males are intended to express male envy of female reproductive processes, the anthropologist should protest that this is an inadequate interpretation of a public rite … What is being carved in human flesh is an image of society. And in the moiety- and section-divided tribes he cites, the Murngin and Arunta, it seems more likely that the public rites are concerned to create a symbol of symmetry of the two halves of society.

(1966, p. 116)

This view is no more plausible, but certainly a good deal less entertaining, than the notorious hypothesis put forward by Singer and Desole (1967) according to which it is not the vagina the Australians seek to imitate when they subincise a penis, but rather the bifid phallus of the kangaroo, whose great sexual prowess they rightly admire.

(A rather more persuasive argument has been advanced by Walter [1988] to the effect that the subincised penis is intended to resemble the not yet fully formed genital of the male fetus, since the point of Australian initiation is quite literally to achieve a second, male birth.)

My own response to Douglas would be that if it is indeed the case that the subincised penis is an image of the dual organization of society—as it may well be—then this image is compelling to those involved in the ritual because society itself is seen on the model of the relations between the sexes and because powerful psychological motivations are generated by the ritual actions and then attached to the social realm, thus inspiring renewed commitment to the now more deeply felt structural principles of society.

SUMMARY OF SYMBOLIC WOUNDS

What, then, are the individual fantasies and conflicts that initiations mobilize with their symbols and action? It is to this question that Bettelheim has made his innovative and lasting contribution. Let me present, stripped to simplicity for the sake of clarity, the main arguments of Bettelheim's (1954) Symbolic Wounds:

1. Psychoanalytic thought has held, until now (1954), that circumcision as an initiation or related ritual, and genital mutilations similar to it, are derived from the castration complex, which in turn derives from the crime of the sons against the father in the primal horde. On this interpretation, circumcision is a symbolic residue of the actual castration practiced by the primal father in his jealous wrath; circumcision thus expresses paternal aggression and in this way enforces the incest taboo.
2. This theory implies that the initiation rites of preliterate peoples are the result of unrestrained id impulses (paternal aggression) and are destructive or neurotic in character; whereas in fact perhaps they ought to be viewed as constructive, ego-based attempts at mastery of certain existential dilemmas.
3. As for what these dilemmas are, we are given a clue by the behavior of some schizophrenic children observed at the Orthogenic School, who themselves initiated a shared secret ritual of self-inflicted bleeding at the time in puberty when the girls began to menstruate, raising anxieties in the boys, with no such definitive sign of sexual maturity, about their own ambiguous status.
4. The examination of ethnographic cases shows that in many instances, either explicitly or implicitly, the aim of genital mutilation at initiation is to induce males to menstruate, or in some other way to master or assimilate, at least symbolically, the apparent female capacity for reproduction.
5. Therefore, it may perhaps be supposed that the existential dilemmas addressed by initiation rites are these: since males, unlike females, have no definitive sign of sexual maturity comparable to menarche, therefore the distinctions between child and adult, and between male and female, are rendered conceptually and emotionally problematic for males.
6. In an effort—misguided, of course, but no less valiant than the efforts of schizophrenic children to achieve ego mastery through apparently bizarre symbolic contrivances—to master the envy of women and their menstrual and reproductive powers that males feel at pubescence, societies institute initiation rites for the benefit of the initiates themselves, so that in symbolically mimicking female reproductive functions they can express and master anxiety.
7. This theory assumes that rituals, including initiation rituals, serve psychological purposes for all concerned, the initiates, the initiators, and the women of the society; whereas orthodox analytic theory has assumed that circumcision and related practices, including nose or ear piercing, extracting a tooth, scarification, and so forth are an expression of the counteroedipal wrath of the fathers alone, to which the initiates are subjected against their will and interests.
8. This theory also casts doubt on the anthropological theories that assert that the aim of initiation operations is simply to instill tribal lore or to mark the passage from one social status to another. In the former case, learning is better achieved through supportive rather than intimidating techniques; and as for the latter, why mark a social passage with such painful, even brutal methods?
9. Other corollaries follow as well:

a. Circumcision may have been instituted at the instigation of women, as occurred among the school children.

b. Secrecy surrounding men's rites is designed to disguise the fact that the male claim to female powers is doomed to failure.

c. Female circumcision may be partly a result of men's ambivalence about female sex functions and partly a reaction to, or imitation of, male initiation.

Many more points are made in this concise and seminal book, but I believe the ones set forth above do at least adequate justice to the main argument, and may serve as the basis for further discussion.

I will raise at the outset, only to dismiss it, the possible criticism that the book seems dated in many ways from the contemporary vantage point. How could this not be so? Every field has its fashions and trends, and they change. Symbolic Wounds is no more or less guilty of this fault than any other book from the same era, and by the canons of the time, rather than the retrospective standards of the present, it needs no defense.

We cannot expect that Bettelheim, or anyone else, should have found the explanation of initiation rites. First, because like all social facts, such rites are multifunctional and over determined so that the truth of one theory need not negate the correctness of a rival theory; and second, because there is no clear unified category of initiation rites, or genital mutilations. Each case is different and occurs in a different social and historical context, as well as in a different cosmological framework. The same action may be interpreted and understood in different ways in different cultures; while apparently disparate practices may express closely related underlying meanings. Is subincision to be lumped together with circumcision and classed as “genital mutilation”? Or are they, in fact, quite different operations with entirely different significance? Problems of this kind are unavoidable in comparative cross-cultural work, and since Bettelheim wrote, we have become much more aware of them. We therefore must not expect that Bettelheim has cracked the riddle of initiation with a stroke; but this has little bearing on whether his insights have led to greater understanding of a broad range of cultural phenomena.

ETHNOGRAPHIC SUPPORT

That having been said, I can state that in the light of subsequent ethnography, executed with the attention to detail that has since come to be expected of the observation of ritual symbolism in our field, Bettelheim's central hypothesis only seems to grow in plausibility and indeed predictive power, since so much corroborative material was not yet available to him. It was already evident in the Australian data on which he relied heavily that the natives themselves frequently expressed themselves this way: they made no bones about the fact that in opening an incision on their penis shaft, they were creating a vagina for themselves and menstruating through it. A plethora of more recent data from New Guinea and other parts of Melanesia, South America, and to a lesser degree other ethnographic areas strongly supports the idea that in many societies, especially technologically simple ones such as hunter-gatherers and rudimentary horticulturalists, men assert that they can achieve, at least symbolically, the reproductive status of women; that they often do this by mimicking menstruation in some more or less direct way; and that they do it in ritual settings that initiate boys, who previously belonged to a female-dominated domestic world, into a secret society of adult males. On entering this all-male world, they have revealed to them not only practical learning but a body of mythical lore surrounding the origins and nature of society, wherein it is quite often supposed that while males are certainly superior to women, and very different from them, yet the secret of their superiority rests in their possession of patently female powers and characteristics, which in fact originated with women, or were stolen from women, or which are in danger of being usurped by women if revealed to them.

By way of illustration, let me cite the recent ethnography, Anxious Pleasures, by Thomas Gregor (1985), a rich study of the sexual lives of the Mehinaku Indians, who live by fishing and gathering on the banks of the Xingu River in the Brazilian forest. Gregor writes of them as follows:

For the Mehinaku, menstruation is the most anxiety-charged of the physiological characteristics of women. Caused by deadly fauna living in the vagina, menstrual blood is associated with wounds, castration, poison, disease, stunted growth, and enfeeblement. Yet there are a number of occasions in which men symbolically menstruate, the most significant of which is the ritual of ear piercing.

(p. 186)

During this initiation rite, boys are strengthened by abstemious behavior and separation from women, and are expected to go through the painful operation on the ears with fortitude. They quite consciously equate ear piercing not only with genital mutilation, but with menstruation:

According to the Mehinaku, the ear-piercing ceremony is the equivalent of the ritual that occurs at the onset of a girl's first menses. Both ceremonies focus on blood and seek to staunch its flow as rapidly as possible. … “Ear piercing,” as Ketepe [a Mehinaku informant] puts it, “is menstruation. The Pihika ceremony is like a girl's first menses.” When pressed further, Ketepe recognizes that menstrual blood and blood from the boys' incisions are not identical: “The boys kid a little when they menstruate. It's not real menstrual blood.”

(1985, p. 188)

Further, in his analysis of the initiated male's ritual regalia, Gregor notes that

the headdress, ostensibly a crown of masculine adornment, caps an altogether different view of a well-dressed Mehinaku. His earrings are conferred in a ritual in which he menstruates. The feathers for his earrings were in mythic times taken from the vagina of the Sun's wife. And his prominent headdress is symbolically associated with women's labia. Fully adorned, the Mehinaku male is an ikon of female sexual anatomy.

(pp. 192-193)

Gregor's Mehinaku material is by no means atypical; the anthropological reader immediately registers many parallels, not only from elsewhere in South America but from Melanesia and Australia as well. Obviously, many of Bettelheim's contentions are borne out by these data. Not only is the boys' initiation a mimicking of menstruation, to which it is explicitly equated, it is also regarded as having originally belonged to women. Men clearly envy and emulate menstruation and other symbols of female sexuality, as their regalia makes clear. And the informants themselves are aware that despite their claims, they are really only engaged in make-believe; and so women are strictly excluded from the proceedings.

In another part of the vast Amazonian world, in the Vaupés region of Colombia, the Barasana Indians described by Stephen Hugh-Jones (1979) initiate their boys at a festival called “He House,” after the “He” instruments, the various trumpets and long flutes that play a major symbolic role in the ceremony. The He instruments represent the ancestral anaconda and other mythical ancestors of the Barasana. In normal times, the instruments lie hidden in the mud of the river bank. By bringing them up into the longhouse, the men reenact the primordial events when the anaconda created the Barasana by vomiting them up. As the instruments are displayed and played, the boys are conjoined to this mythic lineage.

According to Barasana myth, in ancient times the women once succeeded in stealing the He instruments from the men for a while. When that happened, the men became like women, that is, they began to cultivate crops and to menstruate (Barasana men normally fish and do not cultivate). The reason the women were able to carry out this dastardly rebellion was that the men were lazy and refused to get out of their hammocks when their fathers told them to bathe in the river. The women, overhearing this command, seized the opportunity to steal the He instruments from the river themselves. As Hugh-Jones notes in his perceptive analysis:

This refusal to bathe in the morning can be linked to menstruation in two respects: first, it has connotations of laziness … connected with confinement during menstruation and after He House. Second … the most common way of describing a menstruating woman is to say she is “one who does not bathe” … Hence the men in the myth were behaving as if they were menstruating.

(1979, p. 127)

Hugh-Jones argues that the instruments are the symbols and means of the subjection of women by men, so that their possession entails dominance in the society. He adds that while in this society men certainly are ritually dominant, in fact

the question as to who creates remains unresolved and in private the men will admit that in this respect their victory over the women was at best double edged.

(p. 128)

In the ritual itself, men, especially the shamans, manipulate not only symbols of masculinity, principally the He instruments, but also symbols of femininity, especially a beeswax gourd, the analysis of which is far too complex for me to assay here. In any event, it is clear that in doing so, they are attempting to claim control over both the masculine and feminine roles in reproduction.

It is not surprising, then, to find that not only among the Barasana, as analyzed by Hugh-Jones, but among neighboring peoples as well, the shamans themselves, who preside over the ceremonies, are described as being like menstruating women. As Hugh-Jones writes:

At the onset of puberty a girl becomes “opened up” and from then on she is opened up during each menstrual period. Shamans are also opened up in that … their activities are associated with oral and anal incontinence. [Much of the ceremony revolves around the use of emetics and purgatives.] Shamans … are confined in special enclosures during He House just as women are so confined during menstruation.

(1979, pp. 125-126)

But not only the shamans but the initiates also are likened to menstruating women. They are kept in enclosures and said to be lazy, which as we saw is a condition associated with menstruation. During the initiates' confinement, the women do men's work, thus reenacting the mythic episode when women usurped the He instruments and men menstruated. According to Hugh-Jones's interpretation, far too intricate to be adequately recapitulated here, the essential feature of maturation for both sexes is regarded as the “opening up” of orifices. This renders them sexually fertile; but the flow thus induced must also be tightly controlled, especially in women, or the unbridled élan vital will prove unmanageable and destructive. In girls, this opening up is achieved physiologically through the fact of menarche. In boys, it is accomplished by the action of the He instruments, which are themselves long hollow tubes through which air is made to resonate in imitation of the ancestral anaconda, as well as being quite clearly phallic in their connotation.

The Barasana data thus touch on another theme raised by Bettelheim in his book, namely the relation of male continence and incontinence to fantasies of male-female reproductive power. As Dundes (1976) has shown more recently in his analysis of the ritual instrument known as the bull-roarer, initiates are often not only feminized in initiation, but also equated with feces. The symbolic connection arises through the typical male fantasy of anal birth, which is one way of conceptually mastering the problem of how men can imitate women's reproductive capacity. The emetics and purgatives of the Barasana may thus, like the anal plugs of the Chaga, be linked, through the ideas of oral and anal flow and its control, as metaphorical transformations of the menstruation wishes to which male envy of women leads.

I could multiply examples here, but there is no need to do so. It seems obvious from the data so far discussed that these people act as if they read Bettelheim's book before they set about making up their culture. Yet let me introduce the typical, but by no means inconsequential, anthropological caveat that while Bettelheim's hypothesis seems clearly at work in both the instances of the Barasana and the Mehinaku, this not only hardly exhausts all that can be said about them, but it also fails to recognize that the cultural elaboration of the core ideas in these two societies lead to quite different and in some ways incomparable results. Thus, while the Barasana have flutes, beeswax gourds, and make a big to-do over “open” versus “closed” as conceptual categories, the Mehinaku do no such things; while the Barasana do not pierce their ears or perform any mutilation at all, but rather subject themselves to whipping, vomiting, and diarrhetics. Indeed, the skeptic might claim that despite appearances, the Barasana do not fit Bettelheim's hypothesis, since there are no wounds, symbolic or otherwise, associated with their initiation rituals; and even in the Mehinaku case, piercing the ears is by no means self-evidently identical to genital mutilation, except perhaps to the eye of the psychoanalytic observer (and of course to the Mehinaku themselves!).

These and other similar caveats aside, I believe it is fair to state that Bettelheim's grasp of the dynamics underlying ritual complexes of the kind I have briefly outlined here was profound and prescient and retains validity to this day. Having established in what ways the theory is essentially correct, in my view, I will now devote some attention to a critique of those aspects or corollaries of it that remain problematic.

CRITIQUES OF BETTELHEIM AND RESPONSES

CHILD REARING WITH PROLONGED FATHER ABSENCE

One of the main alternative psychodynamic theories of harsh initiation rites—one no doubt influenced by Bettelheim's work, but significantly different from it as well—is that proposed by Burton and Whiting (1961; see also Whiting, et al. 1958; and numerous other works). Their approach involves a statistical correlation of those societies in which harsh initiation is practiced with certain child-rearing patterns. These authors agree with Bettelheim in doubting the psychoanalytic dogma that puberty rites are outlets for counteroedipal wrath intended to instill castration anxiety, and they agree with him further that the question that is paramount in puberty rites is the establishment of correct and unambiguous sex role identity. Their hypothesis is that child-rearing patterns that foster prolonged father absence, especially polygyny, which necessarily leads to this situation, result in excessive identification of male infants with their mothers. Puberty rites are intended to rid boys of the infantile female identification, by severing them rudely from the maternal world, inducting them into the male society with a rough hazing, and symbolically purging them of female features.

Lidz and Lidz (1977) advance a parallel argument about male menstruation. While noting their agreement with Bettelheim in many respects, they argue that the problem of separation-individuation underlies other, later dynamic developments, and that in the process of individuation, “the child internalizes something of his mother and thus acquires a basic feminine component that remains at the very core of his self” (p. 27). In those societies where mother-child symbiosis is strong and prolonged, initiation rites are necessary to overcome the “pull of the wish-fear for reunion with the mother and reengulfment by her” (p. 27), as well as to undo the male's maternal identification and provide him with male equivalents of what in a woman a man might envy, by way of compensation for his loss.

RESPONSE

This theory is thus in some ways the opposite of Bettelheim's: far from making men like women, menstruating or otherwise, ritual mutilation at puberty seeks to rid them of whatever female aspects they may yet possess. Burton and Whiting's theory has been widely supported, not only in their own research, but by subsequent studies. Does this provide refutation of Bettelheim's view? I think not. Helpful data are supplied by the great reams of ethnography, unavailable to both Bettelheim and Burton and Whiting, which have emerged in recent decades from the anthropological exploration of Papua New Guinea.

In one New Guinea group, the Sambia, studied by Gilbert Herdt (1981), the male initiation rite has two main central features. One is a very painful nose bleeding and the other is fellatio performed by the initiates on older men for the ostensible purpose of ingesting growth-enhancing semen. The explicit aim of both these ritual acts, according to the Sambia themselves, is to purge initiates of female characteristics and make them wholly men. So far, this is entirely consistent with the Burton and Whiting hypothesis. Throughout much of New Guinea, blood, or an excess of blood, is associated with females, while semen is obviously male. Therefore the meaning of this rite seems self-evidently to be that female blood is drained out of the boys, while at the same time it is, in effect, replaced with an infusion of male substance.

Herdt cites three reasons the Sambia give for nose bleeding, in order of importance: (1) punishing initiates for insubordination; (2) removing the bad blood and bad talk of one's mother; and (3) learning not to fear bloodshed in war. No mention is made of the envy, control, or imitation of the female reproductive function, which indeed is greatly disparaged. The first reason given, punishing the initiates for insubordination (presumably the sheer act of growing up is a rebellion in itself) in fact seems most consistent with the counteroedipal castration hypothesis rejected by both later authors, while the second reason, purging the initiate of the bad blood of women, is clearly consistent with the Burton and Whiting hypothesis. The third reason, having to do with warfare, supports the view of Young (1962) and others that initiation's raison d'etre is to induct recruits into male corporate groups in societies where warfare is a necessary aspect of male life.

Yet in the data there is support of Bettelheim's position as well, for the men are claiming, in separating themselves radically from women, that they are able to procreate entirely by themselves; and indeed the chief myth associated with the initiatory cult is one that Herdt convincingly analyzes as being centrally about what he calls male parthenogenesis. Michael Allen, who in his own earlier study of Melanesian initiation rites (1967) had rejected Bettelheim's psychodynamic hypothesis in favor of the sort of social structural, political analysis favored by Australian anthropologists in those days, has, in a later publication (Allen, 1984), come much closer to supporting Bettelheim's point. Citing Dundes (1976), whose article on the bull-roarer was itself influenced by Bettelheim's work, Allen points out that while the rites do indeed make men out of the boys, they nonetheless do it in the paradoxical way of feminizing the initiates. We already say how, according to Gregor, the Mehinaku, in their full male attire, are a veritable symbolic representation of the female genitals. Just so, despite their disclaimers,

in many areas of Papua New Guinea … boys identify with women by equating penile incision with menstruation [in the Sambia case nose piercing is substituted for penile incision], while the senior men identify with mothers by making possible the novice's “rebirth.” In semen-ingesting areas … novices may identify with the passive role by their passive intake of semen.

(Allen, 1984, p. 120)

He goes on, very astutely, to point out that the bloodletting syndrome is one in which the men identify with women primarily as creatures who menstruate and give birth, while the semen-ingesting syndrome places the emphasis on the imitation of women's capacity to receive semen and give milk. Thus in the two rites, which are typical of different parts of New Guinea, but are combined among the Sambia, men are in fact identifying with two aspects of women: on the one hand, menstruating women and reproductive mothers, and on the other hand, wives and nurturant mothers.

So while the Sambia give verbal support both to the orthodox castration theory and the Burton-Whiting mother-identification theory, an analysis that goes beyond the informants' own report and observes the total symbolism of the rituals certainly seems to lend very broad support to Bettelheim's view that in ritual men seek to gain and control the natural endowments of females. As Herdt (1987) himself points out, the sexually ambiguous symbolism of Sambia ritual allows male society to offer the initiate “female” substitutes, subsumed within the male world, for the lost maternal identification and/or symbiosis.

These considerations lead me to believe that perhaps the various theories are not really in competition, but stand to one another rather as did the images of the elephant entertained by those notorious blind men of the Orient; that is, each presents a part of the total system as if it were itself the whole, or at least its crucial element. Since Bettelheim's theory was conceived as an attack on the “orthodox” Freudian theory, let me therefore focus my attention on the relation between that theory and both the Bettelheim and the Burton-Whiting theories.

That Bettelheim's book is indeed intended as a revision of Freud, in a manner not unlike that proposed by Harold Bloom for the creative poet seeking to escape the influence of his strong precursor, can hardly be doubted. His chapter entitled “Challenge to Theory” is primarily directed at Freud and his “primal horde” theory, while his final chapter begins with the claim that his book has two purposes, the first

to suggest that Freud's interpretation of these customs is subject to grave doubts, as are interpretations of those who followed him and saw in ritual circumcision mainly a desire to create castration anxiety.

(1954/1968, p. 161)

while the second purpose is to propose his own theory that would be more “in keeping with the facts” (p. 161). This reading of Bettelheim's own motives is lent confirmation by the reparative dedication of the book, which reads “To the memory of Sigmund Freud whose theories on sex and the unconscious permit a fuller understanding of the mind of man.”

FREUD'S LACK OF THEORY FOR CIRCUMCISION RITUALS

Let me begin my consideration of this matter by pointing out that Freud in fact developed nothing that could be dignified as a “theory” of circumcision rituals. His remarks on the subject are all scattered offhand comments made in other contexts, not attempts at a systematic analysis. Bettelheim is quite right to take to task those slavish epigones of Freud who took these casual remarks as gospel truth. Chief among these is Reik, whose analysis of puberty rites (1946/1962) appears to be the actual target of Bettelheim's critique. But Bettelheim tends to set up Freud's theory as a straw man, more in need of debunking than it actually deserved. He ignores the fact that Freud's comments were by and large restricted to the practice of circumcision among the Jews; when he did mention Australian data, it was only in the most superficial way and without any attempt at serious interpretation. This being the case, a number of points can be made from the perspective of the present, when all these arguments are to some extent curiosities of intellectual history rather than burning issues.

1. In an appendix on infant circumcision, Bettelheim expressly notes that what he has to say applies mainly to preliterate peoples of Australia, Africa, and elsewhere, and not to the Jewish practice of infant circumcision. Indeed, he gives Jewish circumcision pretty much the same interpretation as did Freud, namely, that it represents an evolutionary development in civilization in which a ritual generated in one context and with one sense became adapted to a different purpose in a different social setting, expressing heightened superego demands leading to greater repression and hence to the enhanced redirection of libido into the work of civilization. Whatever one may think of this evolutionary view, it confirms that on the question of circumcision specifically as it is practiced by the Jews, Bettelheim and Freud are essentially in agreement. But since Freud was not talking about circumcision in any but the Jewish context, for the most part, then Bettelheim's theory is rather an addition to, rather than a replacement for, the castration theory he attributes to Freud.
2. Were he an anthropologist, Bettelheim would have been aware that his theory that rituals can change their meaning in the direction of greater superego function is exactly what Robertson Smith (1889/1972) had proposed long before in his analysis of sacrifice in his great book, The Religion of the Semites. Freud himself, unlike many of his followers, relied heavily on this work and incorporated its main insights into his own theory of the origins and history of culture.
3. Not only is his opponent a straw man, in that he actually agrees with him, but he is further a straw man in that none but the most dedicated acolytes of Freud, and certainly no anthropologists (other than Roheim, for awhile), ever took the primal horde theory very seriously in the first place, at least not as a literal piece of prehistory (Reik again is the chief exception). I speak with some authority on this subject, since I myself have published one of the most sympathetic articles (Paul, 1976) on Totem and Taboo in the entire anthropological literature; and even I certainly do not believe in the historical reality of the primal crime.
4. It cannot be stressed enough, I think, that circumcision and subincision (or superincision) ought to be viewed as radically different operations rather than simply classed together as genital mutilations. The object of the former, removal of the foreskin and exposure of the glans, is generally understood by natives and analysts alike as a ridding of the penis of its anomalous passive, enclosing, moist female character and fully establishing it as an active, intrusive, dry male organ. Subincision, by contrast, creates a deep scar on the underside of the penis shaft—in superincision the wound is on top of the penis—which, when healed, may be thought to resemble a vagina in that it is in the genital region and represents an aperture which may be made to bleed periodically through reincision. I therefore believe that what Freud had to say about Jewish circumcision and what Bettelheim has to say about subincision in Australia may really be two different kettles of fish.
5. But now let us look more carefully at what Freud actually said about castration anxiety. Bettelheim argues that in orthodox Freudian theory, the purpose of initiation rites is thought to be the instilling of castration anxiety in initiates; so that they are seen primarily as an acts called forth in response to the destructive, aggressive drives of the fathers. Bettelheim, by contrast, wants to argue that perennial customs ought to be understood as constructive activities of the ego, not the id, serving positive functions for all concerned.
6. But Freud believed that castration anxiety originated in boys during the oedipal period, around 5 years of age, in a manner partly predetermined by phylogenetic inheritance. He could not, therefore, possibly have held simultaneously that rituals performed in puberty instill castration anxiety, since by his account such anxiety is already there. On the contrary, it seems to me that from a Freudian perspective, the essence of circumcision in adolescence is that while it rearouses and heightens an already present castration anxiety, the ritual allows for mastery and resolution because it in fact stops short of actual castration, repeats the dreaded trauma in modified form, and allows the ego to see that what it fears is not fatal after all. The initiate emerges from the ritual strengthened precisely because he has survived castration and emerged with a phallus which, while heroically scarred, is still functional. So in a Freudian view, genital mutilation should not be caricatured as an explosion of raw id; this is in any event contrary to Freud's approach to ritual, as I will now show.
7. Freud's approach to ritual in general was never that rituals could represent unrestrained id impulses, but rather that they are, both in the case of the compulsions of neurotics and the organized rites of cultures, compromise formations that enact both id wishes and ego and superego constraints simultaneously.
8. Thus, for example, Freud's interpretation of the totemic feast is that it at one and the same time reenacts the primal murder and cannibalism, by slaughtering and eating the sacrificial beast, and also represents punishment for the crime, through the death and sacrifice of that self-same victim. In an analogous way, initiation rites, in a Freudian interpretation, would express, even just for the fathers, both a wish that the boys be castrated and also a simultaneous wish that they not be castrated. This can be symbolically achieved by a partial cutting of the initiate's penis, which still leaves it operational; which is indeed what is accomplished in most genital mutilation.
9. It is a narrow view that it is only the fathers who might wish for the initiates to be symbolically castrated. For as Freud argued, most notably in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926/1959), a primary anxiety in the ego, dread of castration by the superego figure, apparently arises by two opposite routes. On the one hand, castration is feared as a talionic punishment for oedipal wishes and fantasies. But on the other hand, the boy himself desires castration as one outcome of the observance of the oedipal primal scene, in that the boy wishes to be loved by the father and to conceive by him, and so recognizes that he must become like his mother, that is, undergo castration and become a woman. Little Hans typified the first syndrome, the Wolf Man the second.
10. Therefore we may argue that symbolic castration in initiation rites or elsewhere need not be inconsistent with the unconscious infantile wishes of the initiates themselves, which may very well be to become “women” and to become pregnant by the beloved father. Schafer points out that even mistreatment at the hands of parental figures has pleasurable aspects that are actively desired, including “sustained contact with parental care, or … nonabandonment” (1960, p. 181), as well as gratification of moral masochism. Thus Schafer reminds us that for Freud, “each punishment of the superego signifies feminine (castrated) pleasure in relation to the father” (1960, p. 182).
11. Even more explicitly for our present purposes, Brenner points out the active wishes that may be satisfied on the part of initiates:

[p]enile mutilation, like communion, combines morality and masochism. Among the motives for submission to and identification with parental moral demands, wishes for libidinal gratification play a significant role in both circumcision and subincision.

(1982, p. 133)

SYNTHESIS

Having posed the matter in this way, it now becomes clear to us how the Freudian castration theory, the Burton-Whiting theory, and the Bettelheim theory can all be seen as forming a coherent synthesis. For by this account, the wish to be castrated, the wish to have female reproductive powers, and the simultaneous wish to be freed of these wishes would come together and could be perfectly realized in an initiatory genital mutilation. In undergoing the operation, one could realize the wish to be castrated and to become like a woman, able to menstruate, be penetrated by a phallus, and bear children; and at the same time, through the paradoxical measure of becoming like a woman, act upon and master one's primordial mother identification and thus free oneself to become an adult male with control over one's complete bisexual nature. As Burton and Whiting argue, this syndrome should be most pronounced in those for whom a primary identification with the mother was most salient. This synthetic interpretation would make sense of a great many aspects of initiation ritual, such as, for example, the New Guinea rites that require homosexual unions between older men and novices. Homosexuality, in this view, could be seen as itself a compromise resolution of the antagonism between unisexuality and bisexuality in that it is done only among the men and is considered a male phenomenon; but it also creates among the men a metaphorical replication of the total heterosexual society.

It is, in any event, quite counter to what is found in the ethnographic record to suppose that real paternal aggression is absent from initiation rites. In their discussion of initiation among the Awa of New Guinea, Newman and Boyd (1982) write as follows:

The patriclansmen of each boy are especially aggressive during the initial proceedings. So great is their hostility toward the boys that they are not allowed to be directly involved in the purging ritual lest they handle a nosebleeder, vomiting cane, or bamboo blade in such a manner as to inflict serious injury on their young relatives.

(p. 283)

That this aggression is not only real, but experienced by the novices as such, is made plain in this quote from a Hausa man recalling his own circumcision:

We then realized what was to happen and we got sick. We threw up. Some of the boys lost control of the bladder and bowel. They cried. Our older brothers, uncles, and fathers held us … The barber grabbed my penis, pulled the foreskin forward and with one quick move he cut it off. I screamed.

(Fried and Fried, 1980, p. 68)

This seems a far cry from a ceremony designed by the boys themselves to help master their concerns about the differences between men and women. These boys, it seems to me, are quite deliberately subjected to what can only be described as a castrating attack by their older male relatives, including their own fathers. It is my argument that since they are, after this ultimate realization of their worst fears is induced, not castrated after all, it is precisely this that gives the ritual its power to make men of them.

The point is illustrated in a beautiful example of symbolism from among the Nuer people of the upper Nile (Beidelman, 1966). These warlike men initiate their sons not only with quite extensive and bloody scarification, but also with the presentation of two gifts which ever after will be viewed as identical with the youth himself. One of these is a war spear, the other an ox. Since the war spear is explicitly given phallic connotations, while an ox is quite literally castrated, this presentation epitomizes what, in my view, is the message of initiation insofar as it utilizes the theme of the threat of castration: with the spear, the boy is symbolically given an adult phallus, while with the castrated beast, his manhood is taken away. Thus the wish of the men to castrate and not to castrate and the wish of the boys to be castrated and not to be castrated is fulfilled through the creation of symbolic metaphors of the self, the ox, and spear. In genital mutilation, the same wishes are fulfilled by means of an act on the body that symbolically both does and does not castrate the initiate. But in affirming that castration anxiety does indeed play a role in the genesis of the symbolism of many initiation rites I am by no means denying the validity of Bettelheim's theory, which I feel is established beyond reasonable doubt. For castration is understood in the unconscious as making a woman out of a man. The separation of men from women and the seizure of female reproductive power can only imply that the men become like women and menstruate. Indeed the crux of the analysis rests in the two-edged aspect of menstruation itself, as it must appear to the male unconscious. It is on the one hand a sign of the greatest boon, the female power to reproduce, while it is simultaneously the mark of the greatest sacrifice, the loss of the phallus. It is in this ambiguity, so amply capitalized on by the ritual symbolism in the ethnographic record (a sample of which I have cited here), which makes it possible to argue that when men envy menstruating women and dread castration by the father, it is all the same psychological complex that is involved, one into which Bettelheim and others have offered us penetrating glimpses.

CONCLUSION

It has been my intention in this chapter to reexamine Bettelheim's contribution to the theory of male initiation rites presented in Symbolic Wounds. I have suggested that Bettelheim was farsighted, indeed ahead of his time, in emphasizing the aspect of male psychodynamics in which awe before and desire for the power of the feminine is a strong motivating force. More recent ethnographic studies have confirmed that such themes resonate throughout the symbolism and acts associated with male puberty rituals. I have also showed that, while Bettelheim's view is not complete, taken together with other views that might at first glance be taken to contradict it, the theory of male menstruation envy is one essential element of the psychodynamics revealed in the symbolism of initiation rites. Bettelheim deserves credit for the leap of imagination that enabled him to move from observing the spontaneous gestures of disturbed children to insight into much more widely distributed human conflicts. And his part in helping rectify the false impression that women envy men, but not vice versa, can now be seen as an important step in the history of psychoanalytic anthropology.

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