From the privation of man to its compensation thru culture
(civilization)
From Womb-envy to the Artificial Uterus.
(fantasy or utopia?)
Hanna Kende
Janos Csorba
Socrates: I am the son of a midwife…my art of midwifery is
in most respects like theirs; but differs, in that I attend
men and not women; and look after their souls when they are
in labour, and not after their bodies.(Plato:Theaetetus)
Specific phenomena characterize the human condition within
the animal kingdom, such as prolonged immaturity (cf.
theories from Bolk to Adler), the prohibition of incest (Lévy-Strauss),
the self-consciousness of mortality, and the capacity to
distinguish between good and evil. However, an additional
formative characteristic also prevailed at the dawn of
culture (or civilization), namely pervasive feelings of
inferiority on the part of the male moiety of the human
race. These inferiority feelings incited a relentless
self-perfecting compensatory quest, (a phenomenon that Adler
named “Streben nach Volkommenheit - the drive for
perfection.”). This sentiment of male inferiority stems
directly from the biologic asymmetry between the sexes that
disfavors men. This is what I have designated as the
“injustice of maleness” or as “man’s Lack” (“man” here
synonymous with the masculine sex).
In primordial procreation, sexual roles were perfectly
symmetrical. In his article, “The masculine, forgotten
gender” the geneticist Albert Jacquard notably asserts,
“Initially, gametes…whether they issued from a male or a
female were propagated externally, and encountered each
other independent of their producers. This arrangement
worked very well for marine animals since their environment,
a liquid medium, is both protective and stable.” Then came
the event that Sándor Ferenczi (in Thalassa)
considered the decisive moment in the evolution of our
species: living creatures left the ocean. “But, outside the
sea…in the aerobic milieu, spermatozoa rapidly die….In the
course of evolution, the cell resulting from the fusion of
egg and sperm remained within the organism who produced it -
,by definition the organism called female.” A gestational
period intervened during which the products of conception
developed within a nourishing and protective milieu. Nursing
further accentuated this asymmetry, mammals needing the
secretions of their mother’s body in order to survive. Male
mammals were relegated to the abridged role of gene
carriers. In a species that benefits from prolonged
childhood dependency and caretaking, the young essentially
become the products of a single progenitor, their mother.
Man’s injustice is therefore his
incapacity to procreate.
Contrary to Freud’s assertion of woman’s incompleteness,
namely her lack of a penis, biological incompleteness is
actually the burden of being male: it reflects man’s
inability to give birth to his own progeny; otherwise said,
his lack of a womb. This “organ inferiority” is the origin
of Uterus-envy.
As for the male, as Jacquard says, “the quasi-exclusivity
that nature accords to women in the production of children
has provoked a reaction of refusal: it has spawned behaviors
that have transposed natural power relationships.”
I. Mythological aspects:
A. Prehistoric Creation Goddesses
In most ancient theogonies, the forces of primordial
creation are typically feminine, and carry diverse names
such as Earth Goddess, Grandmother, Mother of the Gods, Lady
of the Beasts, and Mother of Living Nature. The feminine
figure known as Venus first appears as early as Paleolithic
cave art, (cf. for example the Venus of the Chauvet caves
dating from 28,000 BC). We know of numerous magnificent
female statuettes dating from Western prehistory, found
across an extensive expanse of Europe, from the Atlantic
coast to the valley of the Don; in contrast, male figures of
this epoch are much scarcer. These artistic representations
of femininity go back to the earliest periods (the most
ancient, the Venus of Galgenberg dates from 30,000 BC).
There are longstanding controversies regarding their meaning
and nature. “Anthropologists and archeologists, doctors and
psychoanalysts, linguists and art historians, philosophers
and amateurs have indulged in speculation, thereby
demonstrating the imaginative power of these images.” states
Colette Cohen, the renowned French paleontologist, whose
lavishly illustrated book carefully holds back from taking a
definite position. With respect to Venus, researchers agree
that these prehistoric images have little relation to the
Goddess of Love. With their enormous hips and bellies, their
hypertrophied breasts, their chiseled pubes and vulvae, they
insistently depict maternal attributes. Very rarely do they
have faces: only the parts of the body specially related to
fertility are depicted, and these in exaggeration. Since the
4th millennium, such figures have often depicted
pregnant women, nursing mothers, and sometimes even women in
the throes of childbirth.
“In Asian culture, the primitive Grandmother
(Astarté-Cibele) enjoyed a divine cult of worship,” says
Anne Clancier. The oldest cults date from the Paleolithic
period, beginning from the 30th millennium BC,
and persist through the Neolithic period into the Bronze
Age, and well beyond.
“Since time immemorial our ancestors have
left sacred images of the female form. From the caves of
Lascaux to the Balkans, the art of the Paleolithic and
Neolithic Ages, which represent the earliest human
myth-making impulses, indicate a deep reverence for life and
the Great Mother. They honor her as the giver and maintainer
of life; out of her belly the great mystery issues forth,
and all return unto her. Whether or not it was the Great
Mother Goddess who guided our ancestors,…the creation myths
from countless cultures bear witness…to the role that the
feminine principle has played in shaping the world we
inhabit.”
The Goddess has always been recognized in
a variety of forms. She is the Mother of the World, Giver of
Life, the great nurturer, sustainer and healer… she is the
embodiment of what we know as life, her story is as old as
life itself, for she is life itself.. She has ten thousand
names and has been called Queen of Heaven, Mistress of
Darkness, Lady of Wild Things. Throughout the art of the
world we find her as the all-powerful creative energy of the
Life Force” (Adele
Getty, 1990 p. 5).
Regarding the Hindu Mother-Goddess, Charles Malamoud states,
“Aditi, as fertile and nourishing as the earth, the
all-primordial (and feminine), the immeasurable mother, the
inexhaustible nourisher.... is subsequently assimilated into
the symbol of the Sacred Cow.” According to the research of
Volkert Haas, the Hittites worshiped an archaic and
primordial goddess. Hannahanna, who resided in a woody
thicket, and had a honeybee-messenger to awaken the
springtime. According to the Akkadian transformation myth
Enuma Elish (which describes the triumph of the God Mardouk
over the feminine divinity), the fragmented body of the
arcaic goddess Tiamat (an ancient and multiply occurring
Goddess, creator of gods and terrible monsters), formed the
sky and the earth, the mountains and the rivers.
Marija Gimbutas, director of Eastern European Neolithic
excavations (1967-80) and a professor at UCLA, has devoted a
monumental volume to European prehistory. In her
Archeomythology, she describes the Neolithic period as
dominated by the “Religion of the Goddess.” “Innumerable
images dating from the long prehistoric period on the
Eurasian continent testify that it was the mystery and the
fertility of woman as source of life which spawned the
earliest religious traditions. The “Great Mother Goddess”
who brought forth all life from the shadows of her belly
eventually became the metaphor of nature herself, the giver
and taker of life, always capable of self renewal in an
eternal cycle of life, death and rebirth.(Gimbutas, 1996
p.221)
The persistent evocation of ancient feminine divinities also
permeates the literature of historical times. In ancient
Greece, their images occur in Homeric hymns as well as the
works of Hesiod, and in Homer himself (cf the image of Circe
in the Odyssey). However, as the renowned specialist in
ancient mythology, Charles Kerényi points out, such
descriptions have undergone modification in keeping with the
civilizing spirit and no longer reflect the complex nature
of the original goddesses. As for the Theogony of
Hesiod, it speaks clearly about Gaia, the Earth, who
parthenogenetically engenders her future
husband, Uranus,
the starry sky (v.126-127).
These ancient goddesses even intrude belatedly into the
literature of the 19th Century. For example,
consider Wagner. In the Rheingold, at a critical moment,
Wagner makes a feminine divinity surge forth from the depths
of the earth, unrecognized even by Wotan, the principal God.
The supreme danger menacing Wotan requires the return of
Erda, the omniscient ancient divinity who understands the
past, and the future:
Erda: What ever was, I know;
what is, as well-
what ages shall work-
all I show
The endless world’s
All-wise one,
Erda
She warns him of the Gods’ decline:
Hear me! hear me! hear me!
All that exists, endeth!
A dreary Day,
The twilight of the Gods
In the Germanic myth, Edda and its Wagnerian
interpretation in the “Ring of the Niebelungen”, the Gods,
even their chief God Odin/Wotan, are doomed to perish,
whereas by contrast the archaic Goddess, Erda, remains
eternal.
B. Primary Compensation: male Gods
who appropriate childbirth
In the beginning, the Goddesses were endowed with
parthenogenetic capability. However, even in the most
ancient formulations, one already finds hints of the later
tendency toward masculine appropriation of the procreative
process. In Egyptian creation myths, for the first time
there appeared a parthenogenetic male God: Re-Atum-Khepri
gave birth to the first divine couple in a most unusual
fashion----he fertilized himself either by means of
masturbation or with his own saliva. Here is a textual
version from the third millennium:
Yes, it is I, Ré
who grabbed my penis
to extract its fertile water
and impregnated myself by my own fist,
I rolled myself around my shadow
copulated with my shadow.
refreshed myself in its clouds,
I made a terrible water fall,
made the dust that penetrated my mouth
spurt from the earth.
Thus was conceived Shou, the green man
and thus did the daughter of rain, Tefnout first see the
light. . ( Pyramid Texts No 1248)
The progenitor-phallus is thus an age-old dream dating back
at least 5000 years. By means of parthenogenesis, Ré
engenders Shou, the God of air, and his twin sister Tefnout,
the goddess of mist, the first couple of the Heliopolis
pantheon.
B. 1. Kumarbi’s delivery, the birth of the God Teshub.
This particular myth was first written down in 1300 BC in
the Hittite language and partly in Hourrite. Kumurwe-Kumarbi
(source of the name of Kronos), replaced the God Anu with
whom he had fought and whose penis he had bitten off and
swallowed. However, Anu’s sperm made Kumarbi pregnant with
three terrible Gods. The partially damaged tablets reveals
that he successfully regurgitated two of them, but held onto
the third, his future successor, Teshub. Kumarbi, fulfilling
the masculine wish of several millennia, took on the task
(although he could have regurgitated him along with the
others) of bearing Teshub and delivering him into the world.
Some commentators call Kumarbi the mother of Teshub, because
even though his insemination occurred orally, he bore and
gave birth to his successor. These fragments, according to
experts including Volkert Haas, do not permit us to discern
by what means he was able to accomplish this delivery. Zeus
in turn had similar difficulties: by what orifice can one
give birth from a masculine body? He was probably unaware of
the Hittite solution, because if he were, it is unlikely he
would have chosen as painful a method as skull trepanation.
One finds an allusion in the text of the Argile tablet: “He
gave birth like a woman.” Absent vagina and uterus, this
hardly serves to specify a male method of childbirth! As for
Kumarbi’s solution to this male birth conundrum, the
well-known American mythologist, G.S. Kirk hit upon a most
imaginative solution. In his book: Myth: its meaning and
function (1970), despite some obvious biologic
confusion, he declares: “Kumarbi had to accomplish a task
contrary to nature, that of the woman in childbirth,” but
our sage discovered the solution: “The Lord of Tempest was
born through the phallus of the paternal mutilator,
Kumarbi.” The origin of the God was thus doubly phallic: the
phallus of the “Grandfather Anu” accomplished his
insemination, while his birth occurred by means of his
father, Kumarbi’s phallus. Penis replaces uterus. The sheer
anatomic confusion of these images is maddening. It would be
hard to invent a more explicitly fantastic image of man’s
desire to give birth.
B.2: Greek Theogony: Zeus twice in childbed.
Zeus: "Go rest, my Dithyrambus, there within thy father's
womb
Euripides: The Bacchae v. 526-527
Dionysius is perhaps the most complex and controversial
Olympic deity. We will focus here on only one aspect of his
innumerable attributes and histories, specifically his
“second birth”. In the earliest texts, before Dionysius
appears as Zeus’s one and only son, authors did not remark
upon his transplantation into Zeus’s virile womb. Dionysius
is simply the son of Semele, cf Hesiod’s Theogony v.
940 “The daughter of Cadmus, Semele, gave him a glorious
son.”, the XIV Song of the Iliad also ascribes a
normal birth to Dionysius, having Zeus declare, “Semele gave
birth to my valiant son, joy of mortals, Dionysius.” (v.
324-325). In the 6th Homeric Hymn, Dionysius
proclaims himself “the son of Semele, daughter of Cadmus,
who had lain with Zeus.”
The best-known version, however, remains the one that tells
how Hera, to avenge Zeus’s betrayal, suggested to Semele to
ask her unknown lover, none other than Zeus, to show himself
in his full and dangerous splendor. Zeus then appears,
striking Semele with his thunderbolt, thereby annihilating
her. However, Zeus rescues their son, Dionysius, from her
womb, and stitches him (or attaches him with a safety pin)
into his own thigh to complete his gestation. Some time
later, by tearing open his thigh, Zeus gives birth to
Dionysius. Along with the birth of Athena, this episode
figures as irrefutable proof that men can indeed bear
children into the world. Alternatively, in the succinct
formulation of Maria Daraki, professor of ancient History at
the Paris VIII and author of two volumes devoted to
Dionysius, “The patrilineal law of Zeus’s thunderbolt
pulverized motherhood.” (Daraki 1985, p. 218)
B. 2.2 Athena
Originally, Athena was depicted as the more or less
parthenogenetic daughter of Metis, titan of the fourth day.
Zeus, pursuing his supremacy among the gods by sleeping
successively with each local Goddess, began with Metis.
According to Hesiod’s Theogony,
“And Zeus, king of Gods, took Metis as his first wife; wiser
than all gods and human mortals.”
However, unlike his other wives, the future king of the Gods
was not content to take Metis as his wife; he needed to
physically incorporate this Goddess of Wisdom into his
being. According to the Theogony:
“But at the moment that she was to give to him his child,
the clear eyed Goddess Athena, at this very moment, he
swallowed her securely into his bowels, so that the Goddess
might help him learn the art of discerning good from evil.”
(v. 888-890 and 900)
Through Metis, Zeus appropriated the wisdom heretofore
reserved exclusively to the Goddesses; furthermore, he
swallowed her in a state of advanced pregnancy, nearly ready
to give birth. Yet in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Athena
affirms: “For me no mother bore within her womb.”
(Aeschylus, Eumenides Translated by E. D. A.
Morshead) According to the well-known myth, Zeus gives birth
to Athena from his head with the help of Hephaestus who cuts
open his skull, allowing Athena to surge forth in full
armor. This set the stage for Apollo to decisively claim:
Athena, daughter of Olympian Zeus,
Never within the darkness of the womb
Fostered nor fashioned” (Eumenides v. 663-664 IBID)
The myth of Athena’s birth from Zeus’s head is “a desperate
theological ruse”, as JE Harrison describes it, to prove
man’s capability to bear children.
B.3 The Birth of Eve
Of the two extant versions of the book of Genesis, the more
frequently quoted is the one, full of consequences (St Paul
refers to it to illustrate why a woman may not “teach or…
have authority over a man, but to be in silece”)
(First epistle of Paul to Timothy, 2,12-13) in which Eve is
created from Adam’s rib. (Genesis 2.15, 2/18, 2.21-24) Upon
awakening from this operation, Adam exclaimed, just as a
woman might have said after giving birth to her child, “This
is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.”(Genesis
2.23)
An inverted act: it is not woman who gives birth, but man.
This Biblical moment has inspired numerous paintings, such
as The Story of Creation (Bible d’Este, folio6r
attributed to Luchino Belbello dating from 1434) about which
thecommentator Denis-Armand Canal says, “In this depiction,
the Creator performs like a midwife, and little Eve appears
like the ‘child’ of Adam”.
II Transition
The transition from an ancient matriarchy to an emerging
patriarchy forms a major theme of Greek tragedy in the
VI-Vth century BC. The central problematic is the intense
conflict between two grand and incompatible types of
sensibility, descent, and power. Each of the two forces that
confront each other represents its particular truth, whether
historical, moral or personal. To illustrate this conflict
we have chosen three dramas that epitomize the moment of
confrontation, The Eumenides of Aeschylus, Sophocles’
Antigone, and Euripides’ Medea.
The Eumenides:
The story: Orestes has just taken vengeance upon his mother
Clytemnestra for having murdered her husband, Orestes’
father, Agamemnon. The issue is one of guilt: the Furies
wish to punish Orestes while according to the new law, it is
Clytemnestra who is culpable for murdering her husband,. It
is a confrontation between the old divinities and the new
Gods. The Furies, described as horrible ancient Goddesses,
reawakened by bloodshed, shriek, “Seize, seize, seize,
seize-mark, yonder!” They invoke Hades and the Night,
referring to the ancient law that linked them to Fate and
reclaim their lost privileges. They defend the blood law and
demand that Orestes, murderer of his mother, be punished and
accuse the new Gods and Apollo saying,
Woe upon thee, Apollo! uncontrolled,
Unbidden, hast thou, prophet-god, imbrued
The pure prophetic shrine with wrongful blood!
For thou too heinous a respect didst hold
Of man, too little heed of powers divine!
(Eumenides transl EDA Morehead)
Apollo, a young splendid God, allies himself with an
entirely different moral code. He denies the blood law and
goes so far as to reject all reference to maternity:
This too I answer; mark a soothfast word
Not the true parent is the woman's womb
That bears the child; she doth but nurse
the seed
New-sown: the male is parent; she for him,
As stranger for a stranger, hoards the
germ
Of life,.
(Eumenides, v.658-664, transl EDA
Morehead)
Even beyond the role of the Goddesses, the question posed in
the Eumenides is the affirmation of male supremacy, an
overcompensation whose principal argument is the
appropriation of procreative capacity, the assertion of male
exclusivity in the creation of the child.
Antigone
Another play that has often been quoted, translated and
reworked, Antigone is a rich literary lode treated in
a scholarly manner in Georg Steiner’s book. Thirty operas
are devoted to Antigone, and among her modern admirers one
can cite Shelley, Schlegel, and Schelling. Hegel speaks of
Antigone as “the noblest figure who ever lived on earth.”
One, if not the principal reason for the greatness of the
play is that it captures contrasting conceptions of life and
the world on a human scale, a contrast that transcends the
particularities of political or historical conflict.
Antigone is Oedipus’ daughter and the sister of two
brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, who have murdered each
other. Creon, king of Thebes, forbids the burial of
Polyneices who had waged a war upon the city of their birth,
where he had been king. Antigone defies Creon’s
interdiction. The burial of the dead is an ancient custom
dating back to Paleolithic times. Ancient Greece barred
entry to Hades for the unburied. Antigone is ready to
sacrifice her own life to accomplish the ritual that will
guarantee peace to her brother. In the dialogue where she
confronts the King, in response to the question of how she
has dared to defy the King’s command, she answers:
Yes; for it was not Zeus that had published me that edict;
not such are the laws set among men by the justice who
dwells with the gods below; nor deemed I that thy decrees
were of such force, that a mortal could override the
unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. Teir life refer
to the life or the statute(laws) is not of today or
yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they
were first put forth.(V.451-459)
She adds that she could not possibly
have “suffered my
mother's son to lie in death an unburied corpse, that would
have grieved me.” / v.467)
Antigone evokes brotherhood, and the ancient and eternal
laws of the underworld, while Creon enforces the emergent
patriarchal law of the City. In contrast to the Eumenides,
in Antigone it is not Creon,
(to whom Antigone
assigns responsibility for establishing tyranny),
who emerges victorious but rather Antigone, the
personification of love who sacrifices her own life for her
dead brother surviving in her mythical Thebes and even after
two millennia in the hearts of her contemporary admirers.
Medea
The structure of Euripides’ play is especially subtle, since
on the one hand this is a psychological drama that plays out
in Medea’s heart, caught between the Corinthian woman
oppressed by her husband that she had become after ten years
spent at Jason’s side, and the ancient, powerful and
murderous sorceress and caster of spells that she originally
had been. At the same time, Medea represents two
rival conceptions of life, two competing orders of morality,
that of a “civilized” city and that of an archaic world,
called barbaric, represented by Medea, daughter of the Sun.
She embodies the reappearance of a formerly omniscient and
omnipotent ancient force. She comes from the race of the
goddesses. All-powerful, able to destroy the dragon guardian
of the Golden Fleece, and the monster Talos who watched over
Crete, equally capable of dismembering her own brother, she
also holds the power of life and death over her own
children. How wrenching are the scenes where contradictory
feelings clash within her heart. She caresses them,
cherishes them, but finally kills them to avenge herself
upon Jason. In her final scene, confronted by a dispossessed
and supplicating Jason, she dramatically regains her divine
proportions. In a chariot drawn by dragons, her dead
children at her heels, Medea takes flight above the heads of
the mortals; she truly becomes the deus ex machina.
In Aeschylus’ play, the law of blood confronts the law of
the city, in the Eumenides, the law of the ancient
goddesses challenges the new gods, while in Euripides the
all-powerful archaic feminine law irrupts into a so-called
“civilized” universe.
III. Secondary Compensation: Men
engender Civilization
A The arrival of the Indo-Europeans: a value system
overturned
According to Marija Gimbutas, “the transition from a
matrilineal and matricentric society to a patrilineal and
patriarchal society” (Gimbutas 1996 p. 401) took place over
a long period between 4500 and 2500 BC. The society of Old
Europe that she calls “The Civilization of the Goddess”
was “essentially peaceful, sedentary, matrifocal and
matrilineal,” and did not
practice sexual discrimination. She calls its transformation
“Indo-Europeanization.” “Archeological excavations as well
as mythological and linguistic research bear witness to a
collision of two ideologies, two economic and social
systems.” (Gimbutas, 1991 p. 352) This reflected a “…
transition from a matrilineal social order based upon
Theacratic wisdom to a militant patriarchy, from a society
based upon sexual equality to hierarchical male dominance,
from a religion of goddesses rooted in the earth to an
Indo-European Pantheon of gods battling in the heavens.”
(Ibid. p. 401)
Maria Daraki, who studies an entirely different epoch, that
of classical Greece, defines the contrast between these two
belief systems in a similar manner: “there is a veritable
chasm between the human universe governed by Zeus and his
“cabinet” of specialized gods and the one governed by Gaia
and her train of collective, anonymous and polyvalent
divinities: the Furies, the Horae, the Graces…(O)n
the one side are contractual, later political values, on the
other side vitalistic values and the double finality that
orients the entire system: reproduction and the nourishment
of all that is alive.” (Daraki 1994, pp. 163-4). Whether in
the Mediterranean basin, in North Africa, in the near East,
in Egypt or in ancient Greece, male gods became supreme, in
bloody battles like in Babylonia or in more subtle fashion,
taking primacy from local goddesses, as we have already seen
regarding Zeus. They now occupied the position of principal
God within the divine pantheon. The most radical change took
place in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic pantheon, which,
declaring itself monotheist, chased off all the goddesses
(who only remain as allusions in the Bible) and shattered as
idolatrous any trace of adherence to another divinity.
Adonai, El (Elohim) or Jehovah (whose name it is forbidden
to pronounce) became the sole Creator of the universe, the
dispenser of all that is good– the fruits of the earth,
livestock, childbirth, the sole guarantor of a rich
heritage.
“Indo-European religion officially took the upper hand, but
the Religion of the Goddess which impregnated Old Europe has
been preserved up to our own times,” says Gimbutas (p401).
Maria Daraki along with Charles Kereny have rediscovered
this same survival of female divinities 2000 years later in
Greece, within Olympian religion, in the form of diverse
cults, such as the mysteries of Eleusis or the Thesmophoria.
(Daraki 1994, Kerényi 1941, p. 456). Nevertheless, even if
we still can detect traces of the ancient divinities in
modern Greece, every patriarchal society established a
differentiation of the sexes that disadvantaged women. They
devalued feminine attributes and went so far as to dispute
women’s right to maternity.
During the succeeding millennia, the Indo-European invaders
established their hierarchical systems of patriarchal
society, proclaimed the superiority of men over women and
waged power struggles with the outside world as well as the
domestic world of the city (nobles, plebeians, slaves).
Their legislature went so far as to exclude women from all
political life, from inheritance, from art, from public
speech and from culture. This exclusion proceeded to such
extremes as to forbid women from participating in theatrical
productions either as actors or as spectators. Nevertheless,
we are accustomed to refer to the blossoming of this new
exclusively masculine culture, to its innovative
jurisprudence, architecture and philosophy, its letters and
creative arts as the “Greek miracle”.
B. The patriarchal inversion
Woman’s disenfranchisement and the appropriation of
procreation by man.
Beyond the examples of the Gods giving birth and the myths
evoked in Greek tragedy, this appropriation recurs in
diverse rituals in primitive societies and in their
theoretical justification by certain philosophers.
B. 1 Initiation rites
The original title of a series of lectures by Eliade at the
University of Chicago in 1956 was Patterns of Initiation;
the English edition bore the tile Birth and Rebirth
while in French it appeared under the title Les
naissances mystiques (Mystical Births) (Eliade, 1959 ed.
Gallimard). This last title alludes to birth and rebirth.
The young man (for girls this takes place differently) is
separated from his mother. The ritual proceeds according to
a complex scenario representing death and rebirth. In Papuan
culture, the adolescent boy is placed inside the body of an
animal, constructed by his father. But most commonly the
entire group of initiant boys is placed collectively inside
the body of an animal, or the hut where they are lodged is
constructed in the form of a crocodile or a serpent, with
the goal of dying and being reborn there. “The hut
represents the monster who devours, chews up and digests the
novitiate, but also the life-giving womb where he awaits
rebirth.” (Eliade, ibid. p 73). While these rituals take
multiple forms, they contain a common theme: the annulment
of a first birth. This second childbirth initiated by men
demonstrates that men are not less capable than women; quite
the contrary they have the culturally determinant role. In
this sense, mystical rebirth proves the superiority of men.
For Margaret Mead initiation rites performed by men upon
adolescent boys, symbolic imitations of birth and of
nursing, constitute “a means to compensate for a fundamental
inferiority.” (Mead 1975, p99) According to Bettleheim,
symbolic wounds are those where men sacrifice a part of
their body, make secret incisions upon themselves that
feminize them (auto castration, circumcision) or mimic the
feminine sex and its function (subincision). “Of all the
wounds, it is subincision that serves to make the man
similar to a woman.” (Bettleheim 1954 p. 121)
Subincision consists of opening the urethra, a wound that
makes the man bleed. They call this opening “penis-uterus”
or “vulva”. “They construct an artificial vagina, says
Roheim, to compensate for the lack of a real vagina, they
call the blood woman or milk.” (Roheim 1949) However, the
functional difference between men and women is not reducible
to the difference between phallus and vulva—as if the
particularity of the female body that proved male
superiority were that she, alas, lacked a penis. The
symbolic wounds of initiation are not simply about the
reproduction of a vagina but also about the desire to
acquire the specific symbols of feminine mystery. The
visible opening, or the secret one (like the woman’s) of the
subincision, the creation of male menses, and especially the
ritual of the couvade, represent something greater than mere
competition regarding external genitalia.
B. 3 The couvade
The couvade (a French term generally used in other
languages) is the equivalent of a man experiencing labor, or
a man giving birth. Ritualized behavior: the man lies on his
bed for several days and imitates pregnancy and the pains of
labor. “This ritual, says the anthropologist Doris F Jonas,
“has been observed in Africa, among numerous Melanesian
tribes, in the West-Indian archipelago, the Philippine
islands, among Japanese aboriginals, on the Caribbean
Islands, and among Indian tribes in South America where this
rite is partially preserved to this day.” Doris Jonas
interprets this ritual as “the tendency for men to
appropriate the indispensable role of the woman.” (Op cit p
177).
Regarding the Corsicans, Diodor of Sicily (Diodorus Siculus
lived during the 1st century BC) had described:
“The strangest custom in their land is one they practice at
the time their children are born. In effect, when a woman is
in labor, nobody cares for her. Instead, it is the man who
takes to his bed for a certain number of days, as if he was
suffering in his body.” (cited by Badinter, 1986, p. 129).
Aucassin and Nicolette, a troubadour song of the 13th
century, tells the story of Aucassin’s shipwreck. On the
North African coast, he found the king in bed on his
pillows, while the queen was with the troops. He told the
king: “Get up you fool, what are you doing there?” The king
answered: “I am pregnant with a boy baby. A month from now I
will once again lead my troops against the enemy.” According
to Bettleheim: “Man needs the couvade to fill the affective
void created by his inability to bear children.” (Blessures
symboliques. p 135)
B. 4 Aristotle or the bio-philosophical aspect
For the purposes of this presentation, to illustrate the
philosophical theorizing that supports man’s privileged
participation in the creation of the child, or women’s
consequent inferiority, we will not refer to the Middle Ages
nor to subsequent centuries but will focus our attention on
Aristotle:
“In the case of what is to possess sense, the first
transition is due to the action of the male parent…” claims
Aristotle (De Anima II, 1, 412a). “It is the male that has
the power of making sensitive soul” (Book II, 5, Glv). This
sentence takes on a metaphysical meaning, supported by a
consideration of natural history, according to which the
woman only provides a passive and amorphous material, while
form comes from the man. He alone transmits the soul that
makes the living being human. “The female always provides
the material, the male that which fashions it /…/ While the
body is from the female, it is the soul that is from the
male (The history of animals Book II , F6r,). And further
on:”The female is, as it were, a mutilated male“(Book
II,3,F4r)
IV. How to compensate and undo
compensation?
Across the centuries since earliest antiquity, proud of
having created a civilization that in sharp contrast to
barbarianism, represented moral, cultural and legal values,
other philosophers, writers, and artists discovered a
different kind of compensation: creativity.
Or, as Plato expresses it through the words of Socrates in
Theatetus
Socrates: I am the son of a midwife…my art
of midwifery is in most respects like theirs; but differs,
in that I attend men and not women; and look after their
souls when they are in labour, and not after their bodies:
and the triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether
the thought which the mind of the young man brings forth is
a false idol or a noble and true birth. And like the
mid-wives, I am barren, and the reproach which is often made
against me, that I ask questions of others and have not the
wit to answer them myself, is very just-the reason is, that
the god compels-me to be a midwife, but does not allow me to
bring forth Theaetetus (transl. Benjamin Jowett)
In this text, Socrates invokes his own sterility as
motivation for the midwifery of souls, his personal art of
inspiring creators (in Theatetus he is addressing a
mathematician) or philosophers giving birth to their
creations. We can reformulate the Socratic solution in
Adlerian terms: it is in order to compensate for his
anatomic inferiority that man became a creator, a creator of
culture.
Of course, during the last century, in addition to their
anatomic superiority, women have reclaimed other creative
privileges, heretofore reserved for centuries to men. Men
have been left to find their new compensation in mothering
their children.
A.The new fatherhood
In modern feminist literature, some writers underline
similarities between men and women, like Elisabeth Badinter
in the The One is the Other, while others emphasize
difference, like Francoise Héritier in
Masculine/Feminine, Thinking difference. However
it is generally agreed that in the post-60’s generation, men
have undergone a significant transformation. At least in
discourse, they declare themselves participants in raising
children. In Western society, we are witnessing what is
called the new fatherhood. Fathers share the role of women;
if they can’t bear children, they at least attend
childbirth. “With the new fatherhood, they affirm their
nurturing self.” (Badinter 1983 p 257.)
Fathers’ new sensibility is taken sufficiently to heart that
contemporary psychosocial jargon has begun to obscure the
role of the mother: “mother”, in the new terminology has
become “caregiver” states a young researcher. In another
context, critics are wary of emphasizing the importance of
the primary dual relationship between mother and infant,
replacing the concept with “the environment.”
Even philosophers otherwise considered modern throw their
theoretical support to this erasure of the difference
between the father and the mother. It will suffice to quote
from Jacques Derrida’s short volume, Who is the mother?
In an argument almost as specious as that of Aristotle,
Derrida takes on “the ontological negation of the mother”
making reference to certain recent expansions of
gynecological technology such as artificial insemination and
especially “the surrogate mother who removes motherhood from
its natural status. We no longer know who is the mother.” P
41. “If we call the one who conceived the child mother, she
is as hypothetical and logically constructed as the father.”
Here in this deconstruction, (thanks to a few unique
instances as opposed to the billions of actual mothers
present and past), motherhood is annulled, and the mother
becomes as hypothetical as the father.
“The division of the sexes is thus relegated to a second
tier, as opposed to a deeper identity which leads, in the
end, to an interchangeability of roles.” states the
well-known French philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut. (1984 p.
57-8). And in fact legislation has come a long way toward
establishing the equality of women’s rights (the right to
vote, equalization of parental rights, a tendency towards
parity in the higher reaches of economic as well as
political success and in the West, the forces of the Left
are no longer alone in advocating for women deputies and
women ministers.
In this presentation, we have above all emphasized the
genetic (Xy) and biological (no uterus) frustrations that
the male gender has sought, for millennia, to ignore, to
scotomatize, to compensate for and even to overcompensate
for. As our previously cited geneticist has stated,
“Relegated by biological mechanisms to an
insignificant role, male humans arranged themselves to
appear more important, uniquely important. They occupied
front and center stage by exhibiting their power, by
hunting, by making wars, and by speaking very loudly.” (Jacquart,
op. cit. p 100)
In Adlerian terms we could say that they exhibited a
superiority complex.
With respect to warfare, men still hold some privileges,
notwithstanding the fact that men, especially if they are
not entirely persuaded by their newfound maternity,
are in a crisis of self-definition. Finkielkraut summarizes
the question that remains: “What is masculinity? Here is a
question for which western societies no longer have an
answer”(p 579.
-----------------------
V. The ultimate compensation:
Neither the One nor the Other
Does the artificial uterus belong to
the realm of science fiction, to fantasy or to a scientific
project of the technocratic society ?
Through the ages, the dream of transcending sexual roles in
procreation took on the form of the fantasy of male
childbirth. Now, at the dawn of the 21st century,
this fantasy has taken on a new, biotechnological dimension
that can be characterized as: neither the man nor the woman
bears the child.
In his book The artificial Uterus,
the French biologist, Henry Atlan. promulgates this
solution, which was also debated scientifically at the
November 2004 World Congress of Bioethics in Sidney. What
was proposed is known as ectogenesis –gestation
outside the female womb. Of course,
children born from this gestational machine would still have
normal genitalia, but no navel. Nobody has yet assessed the
biological or psychological consequences for an infant
gestated without a mother. However, this is the final plan,
a means that the inherent inferiority of men would find its
ultimate compensation. Man’s relentless striving for
compensation finally culminate in the manufacture of the
artificial human, thereby demonstrating the incalculable
danger of creating a truly post-human being.
How do we redress men’s excessive compensation? Could the
equality between men and women that Adler envisaged long ago
actually come to pass, not merely in a framework of gender
rivalry but rather in the form of a true acceptance of real
difference and the joint participation of men and women in
the creation of a common culture? Is equality yet possible?
Copyright ©
2005 International Association of Individual
Psychology
