Clitoridectomy
Caravaggio: La Madonna del Serpente (Galleria Borghese)
Caravaggio,
Clitoridectomy and the Talion of the Woman
At its best, art can be nothing more than a means of forgetting the human disaster for a while (Isaac Bashevis Singer)
Oct.15, 2003
existence and the world seem justified
only as an aesthetic phenomenon (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 5 and 24).
Clitoridectomy
Caravaggio: La Madonna del Serpente (Galleria Borghese)
For the snake as the symbol of the missing female penis,
see: Why
Is the Lady so Sexy?
In Caravaggio and La Madonna del serpente
I have interpreted Caravaggio' painting as the representation
of the anal - sadistic drive to castrate the female, as is acted out in
many African and Asian countries through the barbaric custom of clitoridectomy.
The Castration
Caravaggio: Deposizione nel sepolcro Pinacoteca
Vaticana
For a psychoanalytic interpretation of the painting, see: Caravaggio and the Deposizione nel sepolcro
Karl Abraham has explained the psychological consequences of the castration complex in the female:
The child's high estimation of his own body is closely connected with its narcissism. The girl has primarily no feeling of inferiority in regard to her own body, and does not recognize that it exhibits a defect in comparison with the boy's. Incapable of recognizing a primary defect in her body, she later forms the following idea: "I had a penis once as boys have, but it has been taken away from me", - a theory which we repeatedly come across. She therefore endeavors to represent the painfully perceived defect as a secondary loss and one resulting from castration.
This idea is closely associated with another which we shall later treat in detail. The female genital is looked upon as a wound, and as such it represents castration...
In many women the idea that they have been damaged give rise to the wish to revenge themselves on the privileged man. The aim of such an impulse is to castrate the man (Karl Abraham, "The Female Castration Complex" (1920), in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, translated by Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey, Hogart Press, London 1927, pp.339-340).
The Talion of the Woman (Lex Talionis)
Caravaggio: Giuditta, Galleria Barberini
Abraham continues:
The primary idea of the "wound" is re- animated by the impression created by the first and each succeeding menstruation, and then once again by defloration; for both processes are connected with the loss of blood and thus resemble an injury...In "The Taboo of Virginity", mentioned by Abraham, Freud had explicitly explained the latent meaning of Judith and Holofernes' story:
In his essay on "The Taboo of Virginity" Freud contrasts the normal outcome of the castration complex, which is in accord with the prevailing demand of civilization, with the "archaic" type. Among many primitive peoples custom forbids a man to deflorate his wife. Defloration has to be carried out by a priest as a sacramental act, or must occur in some other way outside wedlock. Freud shows in his convincing analysis that this peculiar precept has arisen from the psychological risk of an ambivalent reaction on the part of the woman towards the man who has deflorated her, so that living with the woman he has deflorated might be dangerous for him...
It is by no means rare for us to come across women in our civilization of to-day who react to defloration in a way which is at all events closely related to that archaic form. I know several cases in which women after being deflorated had an outburst of affect and hit or throttled their husband. One of my patients went to sleep beside her husband after the first intercourse, then woke up, attacked him violently and only gradually came to her senses ( op. cit., p.345)
The taboo of virginity and something of its motivations has been depicted most powerfully of all in a well - known dramatic character, that of Judith in Hebbel's tragedy Judith und Holofernes. Judith is one of those women whose virginity is protected by a taboo. Her first husband was paralyzed on the bridal night by a mysterious anxiety, and never again dared to touch her. "My beauty is like belladonna", she says. "Enjoyment of it brings madness and death". When the Assyrian general is besieging her city, she conceives the plan of seducing him by her beauty and of destroying him, thus employing a patriotic motive to conceal a sexual one. After she has been deflowered by this powerful man, who boasts of his strength and ruthlessness, she finds the strength in her fury to strike off his head, and thus becomes the liberator of her people. Beheading is well known to us as a symbolic substitute for castrating; Judith is accordingly the woman who castrates the man who has deflowered her, which was just the wish of the newly - married woman expressed in the dream I reported ("The Taboo of Virginity", 1918 [1917], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed. and Trans. J. Strachey, Hogarth Press, London 1957, Vol.XI, p.207)
Artemisia Gentileschi, follower of Caravaggio, raped woman and painter:
Judith Slaying Holofernes; Jael and Sisera
For the psychic equivalence between decapitation and castration, see also: John the Baptist; Father and Lover
Links:
Truth Is a Woman
Duccio and La Madonna dei Francescani
Cinderella and "The Puss with the Boots"
