To illustrate, I show Un Chien Andalu, the 1929 film by Luis Bunel. The threat to the eyes is, for Freud, a threat to the penis. (Aristotle, in the Metaphysics makes it the highest of all our senses and Plato gives it the highest honor in his dialogues.) To be sure, vision is one of our greatest powers. They see how, for Freud and for those psychoanalysts who followed him, the eyeball could relate to the penis in terms of a drive to see a “scopic drive” (or “scopophilia”). When framed in this manner, Freud’s reading of the “Sandman” story in terms of castration is literally an “eye opener” for my students. Freud argues, however, that the endangered eyeball can become a substitute for the penis-that-daddy-may-cut-off. To be sure, the image of the mutilated penis is too much to see. This submission to the father’s will (which we saw is a major part of Misha’s circumcision) is based on the fear that if he violates his father’s will, he will be punished. In “An Outline for Psychoanalysis” he argues that “the primeval custom of castration” is a “symbolic substitute for castration.” And it “can only be understood as an expression to the submission to the father’s will.”
To be sure, Freud, in his early work, associates circumcision with castration anxiety. How, I always wonder, will the class take it when I tell them that the image of a mutilated penis is constantly at the back of their minds. Whenever I discuss Freud’s notion of “castration anxiety,” I feel very awkward. He likens himself to Dostoevsky’s “Holy Fool” – Prince Myshkin because he feels that his great love for his father led him into bad luck which, for him, translates into a circumcision. This joke hits on what we left off with in the last blog entry: the fact that Misha sees himself as the but of the joke because he – like Abraham, the first Jew to be circumcised – is to be circumcised at a late age: the age of eighteen. “Damn,” exclaims the first man, “I had that done when I was born and I couldn’t walk for a year.” “I’m getting a circumcision,” his roommate replies. “What are you in for?” the first man asks. Here’s one from Comedy Central’s Website its entitled “Circumcision…At Your Age?” On the internet you’ll find a lot of these Jewish jokes.
Layout based on Avalanche from Day of Defeat. This can be toggled on or off through game options. Players can now lose their limbs on or after death when an explosion goes off or a limb has taken a high amount of bullet damage.