An Ideology of Tearing the Body Apart: Wétiko Psychosis and Cannibalism in Castration

Medical intervention over moral intelligence

Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ, A Eunuch’s Dream, 1874

If ever the lid gets off my head

And lets the brain away

The fellow will go where he belonged—

Without a hint from me.

- Emily Dickinson, 1863

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;

At least when spring comes they roar back again.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

- Sylvia Plath, “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” 1953

This evening I unzipped my skin

And carefully unscrewed my head,

Exactly as always do

When I prepare myself for bed.

- Shel Silverstein, “Skin Stealer,” 1981

Returning to Shel Silverstein’s “Skin Stealer,” I have been thinking about what has been referred to as the wétiko cannibal psychosis. Its other name has been wendigo psychosis. I prefer the use of it by Jack D. Forbes in Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism, first published in 1979. Named after wétiko, in Cree, also windigo in Ojibwe or wintiko in Powhatan, this disease is characterized by the drive to devour others’ flesh—in short, cannibalism.

There is a distinction that must be made between the anthropological and developed psychiatric usage versus Forbes’s application of it. While anthropologists and psychiatrists (far more so for the latter) conceptualized it as a literal pathology, Forbes applies it symbolically to Christopher Columbus, among others. “Cannibalism,” he says, “is the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit” (p. 24). The wétiko disease that Forbes describes cannot be cured by medical intervention but rather by moral intelligence. 

Exploitation has continued thriving, more so now than when Forbes wrote Columbus and Other Cannibals. Specific examples that he provides in his introduction include the exploitation of “adolescent insecurity” and “the fear of growing old” (p. xx). “Gender-affirming care,” specifically puberty blockers, seems like the most logical development in exploiting adolescent insecurity and the fear of growing old. Children learn they must have their bodies medically reconfigured to resolve the “blue” body mismatch with a “pink” brain and vice versa. They hear that either they medicalize or die by suicide, an effective form of coercion not being recognized as such. Under conditions like these, should we be surprised at the rise in “skin stealers”? To survive, one may seek to escape one’s skin, perhaps by dispossessing another and finding that other skin in which to live.

Silverstein’s “Skin Stealer” may be read as one way of looking at identity formation through dispossession and possession. In order to have “affirmation,” one negates, or gives up, the self understood as “inauthentic” for “the authentic self.” This new skin permits a sense of “euphoria” in being able to do what one would not have done but in another’s name. It is the so-called “joy” of “transcendence” by transition/conversion: “trans joy.” Those who seek a new skin may find themselves dispossessed, as if driven from their bodies, for various reasons, including forms of trauma. Medical professionals corrupted by wétikoism facilitate harm that patients do to themselves and to others. Seldom do the culprits, who profit the most from exploitation, really get seen in the dominant narrative attributing responsibility to patients. Violating their oath to “do no harm,” they feed on the weakness of the most vulnerable people. They are wétikos—cannibals.

Shel Silverstein, “Skin Stealer,” A Light in the Attic (Harper, 1981/2009), 147.

Lying, with all of its contradictions, is a crucial piece in wétikoism. The snake oil salesman markets “cures” that he knows cannot work or that he trumpets without concern for those who believe him. He, too, is a cannibal—never making enough profit selling “cures” that never work at the expense of those on whose pain he always profits. Forbes writes:

Somehow the wétiko believes that he has a right to use another human being (or his property) in a manner which is decidedly one-sided and disadvantageous to the victim. Thus a businessman may sell an article of inferior quality for an inflated price. The difference between a truly fair price and the inflated price is not really profit, because the fair price probably also included a reasonable profit. Instead, the ‘excess profit’ is a form of theft, and theft compounded by deceit. The businessman must mislead the purchaser in order to obtain the excess profit. Thus, lying is an essential factor in this form of thievery. Lying is also almost always a factor in wétiko behavior, and in fact may represent a key strand in the entire epidemiology of wétikoism. (pp. 42-43)

“Gender-affirming care” has lying as its fundamental principle. If it were not for the layers and layers of deception, then it would have no ground upon which to stand. Like adults, children learn they can “escape” their suffering, at least in theory, by “sex change.” Girls and boys become subject to lives now limited by medicalization in ways they otherwise never would have been. Castrated in growing numbers, they cannot truly experience their bodies as theirs. Basic functionality, as part of health and wellbeing, has simply been stolen from them. The human right to health and wellbeing has been denied to them in the process of making human rights violations into human rights.

By Forbes’s definition, castration is cannibalism, especially as it occurs in the dramatically institutionalized form of “gender-affirming care.” Wétikoism encompasses brutality and perversion that make the body a thing to be torn apart. It means the denial of authenticity, usually rationalized as authenticity. On castration, Forbes writes:

The overriding characteristic of the wétiko is that he consumes other human beings, that is, he is a predator and a cannibal. This is the central essence of the disease. In other respects, however, the motivation for and forms of cannibalism may vary. For example, the Turkish sultans who castrated large numbers of males to serve as ‘eunuchs’ in the palace were motivated differently from the popes in Rome who reportedly castrated young boys for their choirs, but in each case other human beings were deprived of their freedom, their authenticity, and their right to live as a normal human being. All were equally consumed by cannibals whose high degree of derangement cannot be denied. (p. 49)

Once, there were Turkish sultans, who made castrated males into servants to the sultans’ pleasure but forever stunted in their human development and prevented from living any other life beyond that of the eunuch. There was the papacy of Rome facilitating the castration of boys in service to art, beauty produced in the destruction of health and the alienation of the boys from their bodies, also done primarily for others’ pleasure. Now, boys, even young men, continue to be castrated, again, for the pleasure of anybody but themselves, their bodies terrorized by transition, another form of wétikoism. One may think of Jazz Jennings, who, having been castrated under the rubric of “gender-affirming care,” told his parents that he heard having an orgasm was like sneezing. At what point will the wider culture stop feeding children to Moloch and see cannibalism for what it is? From the ancient eunuchs to the castrati to the castrated males today, brutality has been a rule in the ideal of beauty and its aesthetic. Think of the female child’s bound foot and the young woman’s permanently disfigured ribs from the corset. Now, think of the bodies surgically manipulated and the flesh and bone disfigured by another binding. Those harmed by castration have experienced the deprivation of freedom, authenticity, and their right to live as normal human beings.

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Further Reading

Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism, Revised Edition (Seven Stories Press, 1979/2008).

Brady DeSanti, “The Cannibal Talking Head: The Portrayal of the Windigo ‘Monster’ in Popular Culture and Ojibwe Traditions,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, vol. 27, no. 3, 2015, 186-201. https://doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.27.3.2938.

Michalina Kolan et al., “Wendigo Psychosis,” Current Problems of Psychiatry, vol. 20, no. 3, 2019, 213-216. https://doi.org/10.2478/cpp-2019-0014.