Interested in reading more about apotemnophilia and associated disorders?
try this:
Oliver Sacks writes in his book on neurological case studies, * The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat * about a man who woke up in bed with what he thought was a severed leg from someone else’s body.
He writes later on about phantom limbs in amputees, which is the feeling that the limb exsists even though it doesn’t. One fellow he discusses lost his finger, and his phantom finger was always extended. So whenever he went to scratch his face, he thought his extended index finger would poke his eye out. Sacks suggests the leg man had the opposite of a phantom limb.
I don’t think it’s that strange to have a medical disorder where you loose all sense of connectedness to your body. Moreover, imagine waking up with a body part that seemed in no way a part of your body. Waking up with what appears to be a severed leg. Getting rid of it might be the logical solution.
While the disorder in the OP is a bit different in that it is a longstanding problem, whereas Sack’s case study’s onset was sudden, I think they’re related. Sacks does not discuss whether the fellow recovered or not. I don’t think these people are freaks, they are suffering from a disorder that I thank Buddha I don’t.
IAMAT,AIAAP (I am not a transexual, although I am a psychologist). I believe that an apotemnophiliac is a closer cousin to a transvestite than to a transexual.
Although both apotemnophilia and transexualism involve surgery, for a transexual, the surgery and his/her new body are in pursuit of identity, rather than being a source of sexual arousal, which is what transvestism and apotemnophilia have in common. In both transvestism and apotemnophilia, the person is changing something about himself* in order to be sexually aroused. That is why they are considered paraphilias, while transexualism is not.
Yes, I realize that changing one’s clothes is a bit less permanent than amputation, but otherwise, they are very similar.
- I used himself for ease of expression and to acknowledge that this–as are all the paraphilias–is far more common in males than females. Y’all got some wierdness in you.
Don’t mean to monopolize, but have to add this:
SwimmingRiddles, Oliver Sacks may not mention this in Man Who…, but he actually had an experience like this when he suffered an injury to his leg. He describes it very well in A Leg To Stand On, which is an earlier book.
The difference between these “this leg isn’t mine” cases and apotemnophilia is the sexual component. In apotemnophilia, the person finds the idea (and perhaps the fact) of their own amputation to be a huge turn on. And then there are the folks who find others’ amputations to be a turn on…
Yoicks!
Not too hard to understand why this factoid didn’t make into my grade school history books.
Phantom limbs are common in any amputee. Ever hear of ‘phantom pain’? The person can still feel the amputed body part throbbing, or aching, even when it’s no longer there.