![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Fetish and the Brain
May. 15th, 2009 05:32 pmThere's an incredibly interesting article in a recent New Yorker that merits reading. Unfortunately, it requires a subscription, but it's worth finding. The gist is this.
A neuroscientist named V D Ramachandran has had very good luck treating phantom limb pain in amputees using just a mirror. His studies extend, also, to people who have the opposite problem - they have a real limb that causes them distress, and they want it amputated.
I was struck by the description of the wannabe-amputees ("apotemnophiliacs", although I don't know why they use the -philiacs ending rather than just -phile.) Apparently, this desire always manifests itself in early childhood, and is specific, unwavering and immutable - right down to the specific spot where they want the amputation to take place.
I've always been fascinated by, and drawn to, amputations in other men, so of course I'm doubly fascinated by someone who wants one for themselves. (I certainly wouldn't, although I think I'd adjust relatively easily were I to suffer one myself since the concept doesn't freak me out like it does many people.) Although apotemnophilia is not an erotic desire, it is impossible to avoid comparing the intensely specific desire for an amputation with the intensely specific desire of a sexual orientation or fetish. It sure looks like the same class of phenomena.
The proposed explanation for this disorder is even more interesting. The brain maintains a "map" of the human body that is surprisingly literal, and Ramachandran has clever experimental evidence that strongly suggests that apotemnophilia is actually a neurological defect in that map - the undesired limb is missing from the internal image of the body, so signals from that limb have nowhere to be processed, and thus cause the patient severe distress. The article mentions that transsexuality might reflect a similar mismatch between body and brain, but doesn't go much beyond that.
On considering this interpretation, I find it very easy to imagine having this kind of mismatch and wanting something amputated because of it. And it makes me wonder if there aren't all kinds of analogous mismatches between the brain and the body, or the outside world, that are so fundamental as to be impossible to change on the brain side - one way or another, the world must be bent to fit.
Alternately, mirror therapy suggests that it's possible to reprogram the brain in simple and surprising ways. The implications for fetish and sexual orientation are likewise kind of interesting. While the idea of a "cure for homosexuality" is almost always offered from a hostile perspective, and the question of "would you take a pill..." is something I'd always answer with a resounding "no", there is something about this brain-map reprogramming concept that is much more positive and less threatening. It identifies a real mismatch between oneself and the world and resolves it in a constructive way. If I did something like that and it happened to make me heterosexual... heh, well I guess there would be a lot of adjustment, but somehow from that perspective it seems much less distasteful.
Not feeling terribly coherent today, but it's provided a lot of food for thought.
A neuroscientist named V D Ramachandran has had very good luck treating phantom limb pain in amputees using just a mirror. His studies extend, also, to people who have the opposite problem - they have a real limb that causes them distress, and they want it amputated.
I was struck by the description of the wannabe-amputees ("apotemnophiliacs", although I don't know why they use the -philiacs ending rather than just -phile.) Apparently, this desire always manifests itself in early childhood, and is specific, unwavering and immutable - right down to the specific spot where they want the amputation to take place.
I've always been fascinated by, and drawn to, amputations in other men, so of course I'm doubly fascinated by someone who wants one for themselves. (I certainly wouldn't, although I think I'd adjust relatively easily were I to suffer one myself since the concept doesn't freak me out like it does many people.) Although apotemnophilia is not an erotic desire, it is impossible to avoid comparing the intensely specific desire for an amputation with the intensely specific desire of a sexual orientation or fetish. It sure looks like the same class of phenomena.
The proposed explanation for this disorder is even more interesting. The brain maintains a "map" of the human body that is surprisingly literal, and Ramachandran has clever experimental evidence that strongly suggests that apotemnophilia is actually a neurological defect in that map - the undesired limb is missing from the internal image of the body, so signals from that limb have nowhere to be processed, and thus cause the patient severe distress. The article mentions that transsexuality might reflect a similar mismatch between body and brain, but doesn't go much beyond that.
On considering this interpretation, I find it very easy to imagine having this kind of mismatch and wanting something amputated because of it. And it makes me wonder if there aren't all kinds of analogous mismatches between the brain and the body, or the outside world, that are so fundamental as to be impossible to change on the brain side - one way or another, the world must be bent to fit.
Alternately, mirror therapy suggests that it's possible to reprogram the brain in simple and surprising ways. The implications for fetish and sexual orientation are likewise kind of interesting. While the idea of a "cure for homosexuality" is almost always offered from a hostile perspective, and the question of "would you take a pill..." is something I'd always answer with a resounding "no", there is something about this brain-map reprogramming concept that is much more positive and less threatening. It identifies a real mismatch between oneself and the world and resolves it in a constructive way. If I did something like that and it happened to make me heterosexual... heh, well I guess there would be a lot of adjustment, but somehow from that perspective it seems much less distasteful.
Not feeling terribly coherent today, but it's provided a lot of food for thought.
