When young children and adolescents are left alone all to themselves in early childhood, it’s not difficult to imagine how perversions like sexualized fetishes can develop. These perversions are usually attributed to what psychoanalysts call “primal scene trauma.” Imagine if you will a rural area, in an under-developed land, where sheep, goats, and cattle are one of the only means for sustenance and income. It’s not difficult to imagine a scenario where a young child turned adolescent, going through puberty, could develop a fetish for live stock. Since live stock will form loving bonds readily with their human owners. Take for instance the following clip:
Now imagine if you will young adolescents experimenting with cattle prods on one another’s bodies. Albeit a perverse scenario indeed, but once again, we can imagine that if the circumstances are right (young children being neglected and left to their own devices) and the required objects/props are available, we can begin to imagine how sadomasochistic themes can develop in the repertoire of human behavior. Young adolescents in Britain and America seem regularly enthused with the outlandish antics of “prodding” one another as uploaded videos pervade the online YouTube community.
One particular theme that I have seen reoccur in behaviors stemming from unconscious wish fulfillment is the cutting of human hair. The cutting of female or male hair by a perpetrator is considered an attempt at castration, degradation, and even possibly dehumanizing them as, something less than human, depending on how the perpetrator views the importance of hair. Hair is, of course, something that forms a person’s overall body image with style and class. The same goes for a person’s body figure, size and shape; fat, slender, round, stout, all combined with style of dress, hair color and hair style make up one’s “image.” Take for example the following case study involving a man, Mr. R, who was a professional in his late twenties with a sexual fetish for cutting or clipping the hair of his female sex partners.
The Case of Mr. R.
The Triumphant Hair Cutter
Mr. R, a professional man in his late twenties, a husband and the father of a little boy, suffered intensely from his hair fetish. More accurately, it was not the fetish that troubled him but the fact that his wife would no longer participate in the fetishistic scenario that he had invented. Because of his professional duties, which brought him into contact with prominent members of his community, Mr. R was most troubled by his slovenly dress, poor hygiene, and some “disgusting” habits such as picking his nose rubbing it into his clothing or wiping the secreta on walls or furniture. In the course of exploring the sources of those symptoms, Mr. R’s analyst discovered his perversion.
The analysis revealed speculation that the fetish was equated with the phallus, but it may also signify the uterus or the vagina. The analyst encouraged her patient to explore his feminine identifications and the relationship between those identifications and his bloodthirsty, sadistic fantasies which revealed nuances to his feminine wishes and feminine identifications. These feminine wishes and feminine identifications made a special contribution to our knowledge of perversions. This case is one of those special and rare cases where the perversion explicitly calls attention to the man’s envy of the female genital functions and the relationship of that envy to so-called masculine sadism.
The only way Mr. R could attain a satisfactory orgasm was if he was to cut off a lock of his wife’s hair during foreplay or occasionally after he had already penetrated her (intercourse). Mr. R had certain specifications for the way his wife was to comb her hair. She had to wear bangs covering her forehead the equivalent of masculinity and therefore not castrated), while her back hair had to fall into soft waves down to her shoulders (the equivalent of femininity and therefore castrated). Except for his perversion and his slovenly habits, Mr. R gave his wife very little trouble. He was faithful to her and was kind and considerate to her and to his son. She, in return, was more than willing to do what ever she could to make her husband happy. Sometimes, though, while Mr. R was cutting his wife’s hair, he had the disturbing fantasy that he was gouging out pieces of her scalp.
One day, after his analyst would not give in to his request that she approve of his perversion, he reacted to this expression of his analyst’s authority by displacing his fury toward his analyst onto his wife. When he came home that night, he requested that his wife allow him to shave all the hair off her head. When he noted his wife’s hesitancy, he reminded her that she could simply wear an attractive wig for the time her hair was growing in. Her refusal made him so tense that he began to cry. He accused his wife of trying to emasculate him. He was amazed that this scene between him and his wife aroused a fantasy in him that went quite against his image of himself as a considerate husband, a passive and gentle man who was fearful of most people he met. He had an image of seizing her hair. Even in this fantasy, the kind Mr. R managed to save his wife from the full extent of his fury. He imagined her as wriggling free, grabbing his testicles, and trying mightily to pull them off.
After the disturbing rejections of his wife, and his analyst, he waited some time before bringing up any more requests about hair cutting. He then ventured a modified proposal. Perhaps he could shave her head and his. With this modification Mr. R had hoped to do two things. First, he thought it would convince his wife to give her permission. Second, he had figured out that his hair would grow in faster than hers. In that way, he could prove himself to be stronger and better than his wife (and his analyst). Once again, his wife thwarted his plans. She found his mutual shaving plan no more to her liking than his first request.
Mr. R now found himself with no choice but to be content with just clipping his wife’s hair during sexual interplay. Nevertheless, Mr. R could not curb his desire to humiliate his wife and so, clipped her hair closer, and closer to the scalp. Finally, Mrs. R’s hair looked a mess with various clippings at different lengths and uneven spaces through the head. The last straw was when Mr. R began to complain about Mrs. R’s lack of ingenuity in finding appropriate head wear like hats and bandanas to hid his dirty work. Her voice of rebellion was if he insisted on mutilating her, she protested, then he would have to suffer the embarrassment of her appearance.
One night Mrs. R could bear it no longer. She declined absolutely to let Mr. R continue to cut her hair so close to the scalp. Her adamant stance brought Mr. R to a state of unbearable tension. This time, instead of crying or creating a sadistic mutilation fantasy to control his aggression toward his wife, he spent the entire night in the bathroom shaving all the hair off his own body. During the next few weeks after the hair shaving episode, Mr. R had a difficult time obtaining an emission during masturbation. Until his hair grew back, he was impotent during intercourse.
Analysis
Here in this particular analysis, hair is the screen that would conceal, yet symbolically reveal, the traumas of childhood. The most vivid and emotionally resonant memories from Mr. R’s childhood were of his mother drying her long golden locks in the sun. To dry them underneath, she would throw her hair over her face. As a toddler, Robert was horrified yet intrigued by the disappearance of her face. What a great relief it was when his mother’s face finally reappeared. Robert himself felt very unloved and unwanted. His parent’s were always lamenting that Robert was the only one in the whole family that did not have “beautiful locks.” It was true. Robert had very straight, unruly, drab-colored hair. His father had wavy hair and also wonderful curly pubic hair that fascinated Robert. Until his analysis, memories of hair and hair cutting had effectively screened out every other item of Robert’s childhood history, including the fact that he had several times witnessed his parents’ sexual intercourse. Robert was a very curious little boy had serious wondered where his little sister came from. These curiosities are normal dilemmas facing young children, wondering about their parents’ activity in the bedroom, and where fellow siblings come from.
Robert had showed a curious interest as a young child in clipping other children’s hair and this interest continued into adolescence when he tried to convince a young adolescent girl he was taking a walk with to let him cut her hair. When she indulged him by letting him clip just one lock, he felt an quixotic erotic enactment. When he solicited a prostitute a few years later, he realized he was impotent unless he could win the approval of her agreement to clip off at least one of their locks. At, first he preferred women with long blond hair.
Robert’s sexualized sadism and sexualized aggression toward his wife stemmed from a feminine unconscious wish fulfillment to possess the long beautiful locks of her feminine identification. This unconscious fantasy was tied closely to his mother’s long beautiful golden hair and his lack of it. Specifically during his early childhood years when he was in direct competition to win over the gratifications of the parents. His lack of long beautiful locks and the disapproval he received from his parents had set in motion an unconscious wish fulfillment to castrate those who possessed long beautiful hair. In a perverse reversal of penis envy, Robert had something psychoanalysts refer to as a form of vagina/uterus envy, in that he wish to procure for himself the rightful ownership to, and title of, the “son who possessed mother’s beautiful golden hair.” This perversion explicitly calls attention to the man’s envy of the female genital function and the relationship of that envy to the so-called masculine sadism; the female‘s golden beautiful long locks and the desire to possess the feminine sexual apparatus. This wish was combined with his masculine sadistic envy of not possessing that which one feels they rightfully deserve. This sadism was enacted in sexualized fantasy as the bloodthirsty clipping and gouging out at the scalp of his wife‘s hair. A form of retributive aggression for his own short comings, and with the realization of this lack gave rise to periods of sexual impotence and sexual dysfunction.
According to his analyst, the cutting of his wife’s hair was an enactment of two unconscious wishes, each with its own built-in reassurance. First, Mr. R could reassure himself about his own fears of castration: “I will cut my wife’s hair. But hair (to contrast to genitals) can always grow back again, proving that castration is reversible.” Second, he could reassure himself that his wife was strong, powerful, and phallic and yet not quite as powerful as he. Mrs. R was a submissive and obedient and as such, he was able to wield his phallic power over her. “I will cut her hair and find the penis. But I can always cut it again and prove myself more powerful than she.” Sometimes keeping track of the balances of power at home and in his analyst’s office was much too confusing. There would be days, sometimes weeks, when Mr. R withdrew from all relations with his wife and contend himself with masturbation. He found that he could alleviate his tension with the fantasy that he could be both sexes at once and did not need any sexual partner at all. He recognized he longed to be a fusion of masculine and feminine. He sometimes dreamed that he had breasts like a woman and a penis like a man. He envied women in their capacity to bear and produce children. Rosemary Balsam in her book, Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis, reveals a case study in which a man manifests this same dream, or wish fulfillment, following the birth of his child and his wife’s terminal cancer diagnosis. These fantasies and unconscious wishes tap into men’s bisexual wishes. Although not all men possess the same levels of, if any, sadism.
When Mr. R. was engaged in relations with more dominant, masculine, and aggressive women, his hair fetish seemed to diminish in response to these strong phallic women. With Mr. R’s awareness of his competition with his wife came the conscious realization that he thought of his penis as a destructive weapon that could injure a woman during intercourse.
Hair served the symbolic equivalent of the genitals, hair could allow him to express his castration wishes and fears while simultaneously directing his attention upward to “higher matters” and away from the genitals, which were so close to the “lowly, dirty matters.” With this strategy the dirty matters could be expressed by smearing mucus and wearing smelly clothes, and the higher matters could be expressed by cutting his wife’s hair. When he cut off all of his own hair, it was because he feared he would become a tower of strength and he feared he would use this strength as a dangerous weapon against his wife. He began to see that his wife resembled his mother and wondered whether, when he cut his wife’s hair (castrating her), he was “attempting to take his own mother out of his wife.” On another occasion he mused that perhaps he was trying to cut his pretty wife down into the humiliating childhood image of himself as a “funny-looking” boy.
Mr. R’s hair-cutting scenario allowed him to attack the part of his wife’s body that symbolized the genitals, but because the attacks took place in the context of a ritualized performance Mr. R was able to protect his wife from outright genital mutilation. At the same time, his perverse scenario successfully regulated the delicate balance between Mr. R’s masculine and feminine strivings. Finally, Mr. R created a primal scene fantasy in which he could identify with both sexes – a mother being castrated by the father and a father whose angry penis is castrating the mother. The once excluded child became the triumphant “hair cutter” who as last had discovered the secret recipe for Great Sex.
Proclivities' Principle Wisdom 