SOURCE: Paul, Robert A. “Bettelheim's Contribution to Anthropology.” In Educating the Emotions: Bruno Bettelheim and Psychoanalytic Development, edited by Nathan M. Szajnberg, pp. 151-72. New York: Plenum Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Paul discusses Bettelheim's theory of womb envy and relates it to Freud's theory of penis envy.

Bettelheim's unmasking of male's womb envy is as fundamentally profound to our society as Freud's presentation of female penis envy. Yet Bettelheim's discovery has met with resounding silence in our psychoanalytic community, and a few tut-tuts or titters in the anthropological community. Paul sets the intellectual record straight by demonstrating that the ethnographic data following Bettelheim's book confirms it—a rare opportunity in the social sciences.

Paul reviews the fundamentals of Bettelheim's argument: previous psychoanalytic theory held that ritual penile mutilation was a residuum of castration. In contrast, preliterate societies treat this rite as a mastery of an existential dilemma...