perfectfifth1979 - 24 February 2010 06:58 PM

The Victorians circumcised their males because it was thought to lessen the desire for masturbation.  Now we just say it’s a hygiene issue. 

When I worked at a bookstore, I read through an autobiography someone returned one day about a botched circumcision.  I wish I remembered the name.  Anyway, the doctor ended up burning this newborn’s penis so badly that it actually just charred and fell off.  The parents decided to have a sex change performed on him, gave him estrogen therapy through puberty, and never told him that he was actually a boy.  He never felt like a girl or even liked boys, so he was unhappy and confused most of his life.  Eventually his parents told him the truth.

Yes, and he comitted suicide a few years ago….

I recently saw a program dealing with the phenomena of “sympathetic pain”. Apparently it is true that one can “feel” someone elses pain, i.e. the husband sharing labor pains while his wife is giving birth.
The conclusion of several sophisticated experiments was that we all possess “mirror synapses and neural functions” which allow us to experience pain, discomfort, excitement, arousal merely by watching someone else physically experiencing these emotions, as an empathic experience. It is one of the reasons why action movies stimulate pulse rates, wincing, crying, etc.
The experiment also showed that, if a person experienced a trauma in the past it is stored permanently in the subconscious, even as the person has “forgotten” the experience. They proved this by showing a person, who had experienced a terrible accident many years ago and who was sure that he was now able to deal with that memory, pictures of that accident. While the patient remained calm and his vital signs remained physically stable, his brain activity spiked to the same degree as if he were actually physically experiencing this trauma.
If this is true, then should we not consider the effects of circumcision (by all accounts a very painful and traumatic experience) on the subconscious and its effects in later life, even as that person has consciously forgotten the experience?