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List of contents
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'
About the author
Jordan Osserman is a Lecturer and Program Director in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, UK, and practices psychoanalytic therapy in London.
Summary
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?
Foreword
This volume places psychoanalysis in dialogue with the history of male circumcision and socio-cultural stances towards its practice.
Additional text
Jordan Osserman’s Circumcision on the Couch is the first, expansive psychoanalytic analysis of a medical procedure that carries enormous historical and culture weight, as well as the ability to ignite passionate debate. The brilliance of the book is not only its lucid and succinct survey of centuries of theological, medical, cultural, and political controversies over circumcision but its presentation of these arguments – and the enormous tensions among them – with nuance, sensitivity, and compassion.
