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 …