Rape of the lock: note on nineteenth-century hair fetishists.

The ostensibly bizarre crime of braid-cutting invited occasional alienist inferences from the late 1850s onwards, until it entered mid-1880s police profiles and forensic-psychiatric taxonomies as a corollary of perversion, specifically sadism and fetishism. Cases were rare, but were reported as late as the mid-1930s and enduringly cited as encompassing a staple variety of fetishism. This note briefly reconstructs entries in German, French and English forensic psychiatry, sexual psychopathology and psychoanalysis.

[Phallus depictions in Bhutan]. / Phallusdarstellungen in Bhutan.

Even in a globalized world, Bhutan is still a country which is less traveled and maintains relative remoteness. Localized in the Himalayas, the kingdom offers, besides its natural beauties, fascinating cultural sights, particularly secular and sacral architecture. For most foreigners, the omnipresence of depictions of phalli, always erected and often ejaculating on many walls of traditional houses is a stunning impression.The popularity of these displays goes back to the "Holy Madman" Drukpa Kunley (1455-1529) who made generous use of his penis to fight demons, convert women to Buddhism and mock the religious establishment. Although there is a vast written and oral tradition on the religious and historical significance of the phallus-symbol, for most Bhutanese today it merely means a sign of good luck and an instrument to ward off evil spirits.

About the history of sexuality.

About 50 years of demolition work, it's time now for a return to the grand syntheses. Two of the great syntheses of the 19th century have now been shattered. Marxism lies in fragments. And psychoanalysis has largely drifted outside of psychiatry to find a new and doubtless temporary home in departments of literary studies. To be sure, the third of the great syntheses, Darwin's theory of evolution, remains intact. But otherwise, as far as the eye can see, there is rubble. The time for new attempts at synthesis is now nigh. After decades of pioneering work in the neurosciences, the fundamental importance of brain biology in the human condition has now become evident. Surely one of the new syntheses will draw upon neurochemistry and neurophysiology, and it is to the great credit of the Hungarian neurosciences that pharmacologist Joseph Knoll has now ventured a first attempt. This attempt will be widely discussed and will form the platform for other work that may end up building firm bridges between "neuroenhancers" and behavior - and, what's more, to show how this relationship has shaped the evolution of thousands of years of human destiny, a great synthesis indeed.

"A shine on the nose": sexual metaphors in surrealism.

This essay explores a curious phenomenon in the work of several European surrealist artists, notably Hans Bellmer and René Magritte, from the late 1920s through the 1950s: In images of the body, a penis may appear in place of a nose; breasts, testicles, or buttocks stand in for the eyes of a face, a vaginal opening for the nostrils, an anus for the mouth. Alternatively, disembodied arms and legs or an elongated neck take on a phallic character, or the entire body becomes an erect penis. Aside from the shock value of these disconcerting substitutions, for which the Surrealists surely strove, what are we to make of them? Psychoanalytic accounts of fetishism point to castration anxiety as one explanatory factor in the creation of such metaphors-Freud's paradigmatic fetishist cathected a "shine on the nose" in place of the missing phallus, as described in the analyst's now-classic essay of 1927. Moreover, the aggression underlying an artist's disfiguring a face by adding genitalia is discussed in light of a general theory of caricature formulated by another contemporary of the Surrealists, Ernst Kris ("The Psychology of Caricature," 1936.) In light of a postwar social reality that included wounded bodies and widespread devastation, Surrealism can be said to reflect the experience of actual disfigurement and death. Additionally, however, biographical information on individual artists suggest possible intrapsychic sources for the hostility behind these sexualized representations.