Circumcision on the Couch

An Independent Book of the Month

Penises, and the things people do with them, have been subjects of controversy for a long time. This book examines how one thing that some people do to penises-remove the foreskin-has become a site upon which vital questions of gender, race, religion, sexuality, and psychic life are negotiated. While most contemporary work on the subject is concerned with whether circumcision is right or wrong, safe or harmful, Circumcision on the Couch takes as its starting point that the significance of male circumcision exceeds anatomical and juridical considerations.

Deploying a feminist Lacanian framework, while drawing from a wide range of archival sources and critical thought, Jordan Osserman asks: How can psychoanalysis help us shed light on the ideologies, discourses, and fantasies surrounding circumcision and the impassioned stances for and against it? And how might the history of circumcision, in turn, allow us to re-assess and clarify how we understand the split (or "snipped") subject of psychoanalysis?

Auteur

Jordan Osserman is Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck (University of London), UK, and a clinical trainee with the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, London.

Contenu

Introduction: The Snipped Subject

1. Freud's Foreskin: Psychoanalytic Interpretations and Applications of the Penile Cut
2. 'Real Circumcision is a Matter of the Heart': On Badiou's St. Paul and Boyarin's Jewish Question
3. The 'Talking Cure' versus the 'Circumcision Cure': On the 19th-Century Medicalization of Circumcision
4. Is the Phallus Uncut? Circumcision and Intactivism Today
   Conclusion: 'The Damn Thing Never Goes Unregistered'