Autospermatophagia in Dhat Syndrome: Historical European Observations

A recent letter discussed “spermatophagia” associated with Dhat syndrome. ¹ Shortly before, the association had been characterized as “never reported in the literature.” ² However, the European medical record has multiple mentions of this going back at least a century.

The notion of “spermatorrhea” (undue loss of semen), often being little more than a fixed idea in some hypochondriacs, entered the Western venereological record during the late eighteenth century and was dubbed spermatophobia in 1839 by the leading French venereologist Philippe Ricord (1800–1889). ³ Ricord had also voiced his concern for what he called syphilophobia, a pretty comparable problem with a history going back to the seventeenth century. ⁴ As a historical instance of nosophobia, “spermatophobia” remains to be researched in full. The psycho-medical reifications of dhat syndrome, during the latter half of the 1950s, unwittingly echoed a European psychiatric reification of semen-based anxieties then well over a century old. During the early twentieth century, semen loss anxieties ended up as an established motif in psychoanalysis and, at times, came to be associated with what in 1908 came to be called schizophrenia. Crucial for a critical—and specifically a postcolonial—perspective is that, in the opinion of German psychiatrist Alfred Storch (1888–1962), these anxieties were something schizophrenics and “primitives” had in common. The “severely schizoid obsessive-compulsive neurotic” whose “fear went so far that he ingested the semen he had wasted through masturbation mixed with liquid” stood on the same plane as the prayers of the Brahmin student to restore lost semen. ⁵ Ingestion of semen was seen more often. One of Hermann Nunberg’s (1884–1970) patients “thought that ordinary masturbation and sexual intercourse weakened (castrated) a man, while the swallowing of semen strengthened him.” ⁶ In 1931, New York–based psychoanalyst Sándor Lorand (1893–1987) noted that “The extreme degree to which this fear [of semen loss] may go was shown in one of my patients who swallowed the semen emitted during masturbation.” ⁷

These cases beg for a historical approach, specifically given that well into the twentieth century, semen was said to be reabsorbed into the bloodstream and credited with testosterone-like effects. In this light, its ingestion could still hardly be called irrational: it reflected a centuries-old proto-endocrinological concept of semen recirculation. Readers are reminded of the antics of Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, who, in 1889, injected himself with animal semen and testicular extract in an effort to replenish what he thought he had lost in advanced age. This was, to many historians, “the birth of endocrinology.” Struggling to appreciate the gesture during the early 1890s, physician-chemist Paul Fürbringer (1849–1930), on several occasions, brought up the anecdote that one of his “perverted” patients ingested semen and did so well before Brown-Séquard: “So here the most adverse aberration of the human spirit lay right next to the rational idea of the centuries.” ⁸

In short, (a) semen loss anxieties have a long and underappreciated record in Europe, and (b) the idea of semen ingestion as a corollary of lay physiology superseded by endocrinology during the early twentieth century was a recurrent motif in the psychodynamic texts of the day. Spermatophagia is a term very rarely used in any medical speciality (spermatophagy denotes macrophage-mediated phagocytosis of spermatozoa), incidentally, and one has to go back to the early twentieth century to see it listed together with terms such as “onanism” and “sodomy.” “Autospermatophagia” seems exploration-worthy mainly when motivated by health worries related to Dhat. It is sometimes recorded in the histories of paraphiliacs but virtually always with unclear significance (one famous necrophiliac considered it “a shame to let it [semen] go to waste”). ⁹ Any significance will be both cultural and historical.