Human Penis Removal in Medicine and Psychology
Some men have penile amputations, known as penectomies, for medical reasons. Cancer, for example, sometimes necessitates removal of all or part of the penis. In some instances, botched childhood circumcisions have also resulted in full or partial penectomies.
Genital surgical procedures for trans women (transgender or transsexual women) undergoing sex reassignment surgery, do not usually involve the complete removal of the penis; part or all of the glans is usually kept and reshaped as a clitoris, and the skin of the penile shaft may also be inverted to form the vagina. When procedures such as this are not possible, other procedures such as colovaginoplasty are used which do involve the removal of the penis.
Issues related to the removal of the penis appear in psychology, for example in the condition known as castration anxiety. Others, who associate the organ with rape and male dominance and aggression, may consciously or subconsciously see the organ (their own or those of others) as a weapon and express a hatred for it, potentially desiring to see it violently removed.
Some men have undergone penectomies as a voluntary body modification, thus including it as part of a body dysmorphic disorder. Professional opinion is divided regarding the desire for penile amputation as a pathology, much as all other forms of treatment by amputation for body dysmorphic disorder. Voluntary subincision, removal of the glans penis, and bifurcation of the penis are related topics.
Read more about this topic: Penis Removal
Famous quotes containing the words human, removal, medicine and/or psychology:
“If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,—and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienest who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous.... The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)